
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



V 




ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT 



The Rulers 

of 

The Mediterranean 



BY 



V^ 



RICHARD HARDING DAVIS 

AUTHOR OF 

THE WEST FROM A CAR-WINDOW " " GALLEGHER ' 
"van BIBBER AND OTHERS" ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED 





J77JA^^ 



NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1894 



L 



/^^3 



Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



TO 



HON. EDWARD C. LITTLE 

EX-DIPLOMATIC-AGENT AND CONSUL-GENERAL 

OF 

THE UNITED STATES TO EGYPT 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR I 

II TANGIER -31 

III FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 'J2 

IV CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 102 

V THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 1 39 

VI MODERN ATHENS 1 78 

VII CONSTANTINOPLE I98 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGE 

ONE OF THE CAMEL CORPS OF EGYPT .... Frontispiece 

THE MAN FROM DETROIT : . . . 5 

THE ROCK FROM THE BAY 9 

TYPES 13 

GIBRALTAR AS SEEN ACROSS THE NEUTRAL GROUND . . 15 

AN ENGLISH SENTRY IQ 

A SPANISH SENTRY 21 

SIGNAL STATION ON THE TOP OF THE ROCK .... 25 

CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES 29 

TEA IN THE OFFICERS' QUARTERS 33 

BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE . , 4 1 

SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL . 47 

A WOMAN OF TANGIER 53 

WATER-VENDER AT THE DOOR OF A PRIVATE HOUSE . . 57 

A STREET DANCER ,63 

IN THE PRISON 67 

MALTESE PEDDLERS 75 

STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA 79 

BRINDISI 85 

PILLAR OF C^SAR AT BRINDISI 89 

APPROACH TO ISMAILIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL .... 93 

STEAM-DREDGE AT WORK IN THE SUEZ CANAI 97 

BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS IO5 

GROUP OF NATIVES IN FRONT OF SHEPHEARD'S HOTEL . IO9 



X ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

A BRITISH SQUARE FORMED IN FRONT OF THE PYRAMIDS II 7 

SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS I23 

A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID 1 29 

DAHABEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO I35 

EGYPTIAN INFANTRY IN THEIR DIFFERENT UNIFORMS . I4I 

RIAZ PASHA, PRIME-MINISTER OF EGYPT I45 

AN EGYPTIAN LANCER I49 

TIGRANE PASHA, MINISTER OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS . . .153 

A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA I57 

H. H. ABBAS IL, KHEDIVE OF EGYPT 161 

THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY 1 65 

LORD CROMER, THE ENGLISH DIPLOMATIC AGENT IN EGYPT 169 

A GUN OF THE MULE BATTERY IN ACTION 1 73 

GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL (ALBANIAN) UNIFORM . 1 79 

GREEK PEASANT GIRL 181 

THE UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS . . . 183 

ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN .- 1 86 

ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN . . 187 

GREEK PEASANT . 188 

ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS . . . 189 

POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL I9I 

AN OLD ATHENIAN OF THE PRESENT DAY I94 

A GREEK SHEPHERD 195 

GENERAL VIEW OF CONSTANTINOPLE . 201 

ONE OF THE SULTAN'S PALACES ON THE BOSPORUS . . 205 

A FIRE COMPANY OF CONSTANTINOPLE 209 

STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE 21 5 

GUARD OF CAVALRY PRECEDING THE SULTAN TO THE 

MOSQUE 219 

EXTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF ST. SOPHIA . . . . . 225 




# THE RULERS OF THE f|| ' .^., 
l^'-:^ MEDiTERRANEAN l--^^ ' 




THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 




F you have always crossed the At- 
lantic in the spring-time or in 
the summer months, as do 
most tourists, you will find 
that leaving New York in the 
winter is more like a relief 
expedition to the north pole 

1=-^ than the setting forth on a 
pleasure tour to the summer 
shores of the Mediterranean. 
There is no green grass on 
the hills of Staten Island, but 
there is, instead, a long field of ice stretching far 
up the Hudson River, and a wind that cuts into 
the face, and dashes the spray up over the tug- 
boats in frozen layers, leaving it there like the 
icing on a cake. The Atlantic Highlands are 
black w^ith bare branches and white with snow, 
and you observe for the first time that men 
who go down to the sea in ships know nothing 



2 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

of open fireplaces. An icy wind keeps the deck 
as clear as a master-at-arms could do it ; and sud- 
den storms of snow, which you had always before 
associated with streets or fields, and not at all 
with the decks of ships, burst over the side, and 
leave the wood-work wet and slippery, and cold 
to the touch. 

And then on the third or fourth day out the 
sea grows calm, and your overcoat seems to have 
taken on an extra lining; and strange people, who 
apparently have come on board during the night, 
venture out on the sunlit deck and inquire for 
steamer chairs and mislaid rugs. 

These smaller vessels which run from New 
York to Genoa are as different from the big 
North Atlantic boats, with their twin screws 
and five hundred cabin passengers, as a fam- 
ily boarding-house is from a Broadway hotel. 
This is so chiefly because you are sailing under 
a German instead of an English flag. There 
is no one so important as an English captain — 
he is like a bishop in gold lace; but a German 
captain considers his passengers as one large 
happy family, and treats them as such, whether 
they like their new relatives or not. The dis- 
cipline on board the Fiilda was like that of a 
ship of war, where the officers and crew were 
concerned, but the passengers might have be- 
lieved they were on their own private yacht. 

There was music for breakfast, dinner, and tea; 
music when the fingers of the trombonist were 
frozen and when the snow fell upon the taut sur- 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 3 

face of the big drum ; and music at dawn to tell 
us it was Sunday, so that you awoke imagining- 
yourself at church. There was also a ball, and 
the captain led an opening march, and the stew- 
ards stood at every point to see that the passen- 
gers kept in line, and '' rounded up " those who 
tried to slip away from the procession. There 
were speeches, too, at all times, and lectures and 
religious services, and on the last night out a 
grand triumph of the cJief, who built wonderful 
candy goddesses of Liberty smiling upon the 
other symbolic lady who keeps watch on the 
Rhine, and the band played " Dixie," which it 
had been told was the national anthem, and the 
portrait of the German Emperor smiled down 
upon us over his autograph. All this was inter- 
esting, because it was characteristic of the Ger- 
mans; it showed their childish delight in little 
things, and the same simplicity of character 
which makes the German soldiers who would not 
move out of the way of the French bullets dance 
around a Christmas-tree. The American or the 
Englishman will not do these things, because he 
has too keen a sense of the ridiculous, and is 
afraid of being laughed at. So when he goes to 
sea he plays poker and holds auctions on the 
run. 

There was only one passenger on board who 
objected to the music. He was from Detroit, 
and for the first three days remained lashed to 
his steamer chair like a mummy, with nothing- 
showing but a blue nose and closed eyelids. The 



4 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

band played at his end of the deck, and owing to 
the fingers of the players being frozen, and to 
the sudden lurches of the ship, the harmony was 
sometimes destroyed. Those who had an ear for 
music picked up their steamer chairs and moved 
to windward ; but this young man, being half 
dead and firmly lashed to his place, was unable 
to save himself. 

On the morning of the fourth day, when the 
concert was over and the band had gone to thaw 
out, the young man suddenly sat upright and 
pointed his forefinger at the startled passengers. 
We had generally decided that he was dead. 
'' The Lord knows I'm a sick man," he said, blink- 
ing his eyes feebly; " but if I live till midnight 
I'll find out where they hide those horns, and I'll 
drop 'em into the Gulf Stream, if it takes my dy- 
ing breath." He then fell over backwards, and 
did not speak again until we reached Gibraltar. 

There is something about the sight of land af- 
ter one has been a week without it which sup- 
pHes a want that nothing else can fill ; and it is 
interesting to note how careless one is as to its 
name, or whether it is pink or pale blue on the 
maps, or whether it is ruled by a king or a colo- 
nial secretary. It is quite sufficient that it is land. 
This was impressed upon me once, on entering 
New York Harbor, by a young man who emerged 
from his deck cabin to discover, what all the other 
passengers already knew, that we were in the up- 
per bay. He gave a shout of ecstatic relief and 
pleasure. " That," he cried, pointing to the west, 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 5 

"is Staten Island, but that," pointing to the right, 
"is Land." 

The first land you see on going to Gibraltar 
is the Azores Islands. They are volcanic and 
mountainous, and accompany the boat for a day 
and a half ; but they could be improved if they 
were moved farther south about two hundred 




THE MAN FROM DETROIT 



miles, as one has to get up at dawn to see the 
best of them. It is quite warm by this time, and 
the clothes you wore in New York seem to be- 
long to a barbarous period and past fashion, and 
have become heavy and cumbersome, and take up 
an unnecessary amount of room in your trunk. 
And then people tell you that there is land in 



6 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

sight again, and you find how really far you are 
from home when you learn that it is Portugal, 
and so a part of Europe, and not an island 
thrown up by a volcano, or stolen or strayed from 
its moorings at the mainland. Portugal is ap- 
parently a high red hill, with around white tower 
on the top of it flying signal flags. Its chief in- 
dustry is the arranging of these flags by a man. 
It is, on the whole, a disappointing country. 
After this, everybody begins to pack and to ex- 
change visiting-cards ; and those who are to get 
off at Gibraltar are pursued by stewards and band- 
masters and young men with testimonials that 
they want signed, and by the weak in spirit, who, 
at the eleventh hour, think they will not go on 
to Genoa, but will get off here and go on to Tan- 
gier, and who want you to decide for them. And 
which do you think would pay best, and what is 
there to see in Tangier, anyway? And as that 
is exactly what you are going to find out, you 
cannot tell. 

When I left the deck the last night out the 
stars were all over the heavens ; and the foremast, 
as it swept slowly from side to side, looked like 
a black pendulum upside down marking out the 
sky and portioning off the stars. And when I 
woke there was a great creaking of chains, and I 
could see out of my port-hole hundreds of fixed 
lights and rows and double rows of lamps, so that 
you might have thought the ship during the 
night had run aground in the heart of a city. 

The first sight of Gibraltar is, I think, dis- 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 7 

appointing. It means so much, and so many 
lives have been given for it, and so many ships 
have been sunk by its batteries, and such great 
powers have warred for twelve hundred years 
for its few miles of stone, that its black outline 
against the sky, w^ith nothing to measure it with 
but the fading stars, is dwarfed and spoiled. It 
is only after the sun begins to turn the lights 
out, and you are able to compare it with the 
great ships at its base, and you see the battle- 
ments and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds 
resting on its top, that you understand it ; and 
then when the outline of the crouching lion, that 
faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember 
it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, 
of which England holds the key. And even while 
you feel this, and are greedily following the course 
of each rampart and terrace with eyes that are 
tired of blank stretches of water, some one points 
to a low line of mountains lying like blue clouds 
before the red sky of the sunrise, dim, forbid- 
ding, and mysterious — and you know that it is 
Africa. 

Spain, lying to the right, all green and ame- 
thyst, and flippant and gay with white houses and 
red roofs, and Gibraltar's grim show of battle- 
ments and war, become somehow of little mo- 
ment. You feel that you have known them al- 
ways, and that they are as you fancied they 
would be. But this other land across the water 
looks as inscrutable, as dark, and as silent as the 
Sphinx that typifies it, and you feel that its Pil- 



8 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

lar of Hercules still marks the entrance to the 
'' unknown world." 

Nine out of every ten of those who visit Gibral- 
tar for the first time expect to find an island. It 
ought to be, and it would be one but for a strip 
of level turf half a mile wide and half a mile long 
which joins it to the sunny green hills of Spain. 
But for this bit of land, which they call '' the Neu- 
tral Ground," Gibraltar would be an island, for it 
has the Mediterranean to the east, a bay, and be- 
yond that the hills of Spain to the west, and Af- 
rica dimly showing fourteen miles across the sea 
to the south. 

Gibraltar has been besieged thirteen times ; by 
Moors and by Spaniards, and again by Moors, 
and again by Spaniards against Spaniards. It 
was during one of these wars between two fac- 
tions in Spain, in 1704, that the English, who 
were helping one of the factions, took the Rock, 
and were so well pleased with it that they settled 
there, and have remained there ever since. If 
possession is nine points of the law, there was 
never a place in the history of the world held 
with nine as obvious points. There were three 
more sieges after the English took Gibraltar, one 
of them, the last, continuing for four years. The 
English were fighting America at the time, and 
rowing in the Nile, and so did not do much tow- 
ards helping General George Elliot, who was 
Governor of the Rock at that time. It would 
appear to be, as well as one can judge from this 
distance, a case of neglect on the part of the 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR II 

mother-country for her Httle colony and her six 
thousand men, very much Hke her forgetfulness 
of Gordon, only Elliot succeeded where Gordon 
failed (if you can associate that word with that 
name), and so no one blamed the home govern- 
ment for risking what would have been a more 
serious loss than the loss of Calais, had Elliot 
surrendered, and "Gib" gone back to its rightful 
owners, that is, the owners who have the one 
point. The history of this siege is one of the 
most interesting of war stories ; it is interesting 
whether you ever expect to visit Gibraltar or not ; 
it is doubly interesting when you walk the pretty 
streets of the Rock to-day, with its floating pop- 
ulation of twenty thousand, and try to imagine 
the place held by six thousand half-starved, sick, 
and wounded soldiers, living at times on grass 
and herbs and handfuls of rice, and yet carrying 
on an apparently forlorn fight for four years 
against the entire army and navy of Spain, and, 
at the last, against the arms of France as well. 

We are apt to consider the Gibraltar of to-day 
as occupying the same position to the Mediterra- 
nean as Queenstown does to the Atlantic, a place 
where passengers go ashore while the mails are 
being taken on board, and not so much for their 
interest in the place itself as to again feel solid 
earth under their feet. There are passengers 
who will tell you on the way out that you can 
see all there is to be seen there in three hours. 
As a matter of fact, one can live in Gibraltar for 
many weeks and see something new every day. 



12 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

It struck me as being more different kinds of a 
place than any other spot of land I had ever visit- 
ed, and one that changed its aspect with every 
shifting of the wind, and with each rising and set- 
ting of the sun. It is the clearing-house for three 
most picturesque peoples — the Moors, in their 
yellow slippers and bare legs and voluminous 
robes and snowy turbans ; the Spaniards, with 
romantic black capes and cloaks and red sashes, 
the women with the lace mantilla and brilliant 
kerchiefs and pretty faces ; and, mixed with these, 
the pride and glory of the British army and navy, 
in all the bravery of red coats and white helmets, 
or blue jackets, or Highland kilts. It is a fortress 
as imposing as the Tower of London, a winter 
resort as pretty as St. Augustine, and a seaport 
town of free entry, into which come on every tide 
people of many nations, and ships flying every 
flag. 

Around its base are the ramparts, like a band 
of stone and steel; above them the town, rising 
like a staircase, with houses for steps — yellow 
houses, with light green blinds sticking out at 
diff'erent angles, and with sloping red roofs meet- 
ing other lines of red roofs, and broken by a car- 
peting of green where the parks and gardens 
make an opening in the yellow front of the town, 
and from which rise tall palms and palmettoes, 
and rows of sea-pines, and fluttering union-jacks 
which mark the barracks of a regiment. Above 
the town is the Rock, covered with a green 
growth of scrub and of little trees below, and 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 



13 




A TYPE 



naked and bare above, stretching for several miles 

from north to south, and rearing its great bulk 

up into the sky until it loses its 

summit in the clouds. It is never 

twice the same. To-day it may 

be smiling and resplendent under 

a warm, brilliant sun that spreads 

out each shade of green, and 

shows each terrace and rampart 

as clearly as though one saw it . 

through a glass; the sky becomes 

as blue as the sea and the bay, 

and the white villages of Spain 

seem as near to one as the red 

soldier smoking his pipe on the 

mountings half-way up the Rock. 

And to-morrow the whole top of the Rock may 

be lost in a thick curtain of gray clouds, and the 

waters of the bay will be tossing and covered with 

white -caps, and the lands 
about disappear from sight 
as though they had sunk into 
the sea during the night and 
had left you alone on an 
island. At times a sunset 
paints the Rock a martial 
red, or the moonlight softens 
it, and you see only the tall 
palms and the graceful bal- 
conies and the gardens of 

plants, and each rampart becomes a terrace and 

each casemate a balcony. Or at night, when 




A TYPE 



14 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

the lamps are lit, you might imagine yourself on 
the stage of a theatre, walking in a scene set for 
Fra Diavolo. 

There are no such streets or houses outside of 
stage-land. It is only in stage cities that the 
pavements and streets are so conspicuously clean, 
or that the hanging lamps of beaten iron-work 
throw such deep shadows, or that there are such 
high, heavily carved Moorish doorways and mys- 
terious twisting stairways in the solid rock, or 
shops with such queer signs, or walls plastered 
with such odd-colored placards — streets where 
every footfall echoes, and where dark figures sud- 
denly appear from narrow alleyways and cry 
'' Halt, there !" at you, and then '' All's well " as 
you pass by. 

Gibraltar has one main street running up and 
clinging to the side of the hill from the principal 
quay to the most southern point of the Rock. 
Houses reach up to it from the first level of the 
ramparts, and continue on up the hill from its 
other side. On this street are the bazars of the 
Moors, and the English shops and the Spanish 
cafes, and the cathedral, and the hotels, and the 
Governor's house, and every one in Gibraltar is 
sure to appear on it at least once in the twenty- 
four hours. But the color and tone of the street 
are military. There are soldiers at every step — 
soldiers carrying the mail or bearing reports, or 
soldiers in bulk with a band ahead, or soldiers 
going out to guard the North Front, where lies 
the Neutral Ground, or to target practice, or to 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 1 7 

play football ; soldiers in two or threes, with their 
sticks under their arms, and their caps very much 
cocked, and pipes in their mouths. But these 
make slow progress, for there is always an officer 
in sight — either a boy officer just out from Eng- 
land riding to the polo field near the Neutral 
Ground, or a commanding officer in a black tunic 
and a lot of ribbons across his breast, or an of- 
ficer of the day with his sash and sword ; and each 
of these has to be saluted. This is an interest- 
ing spectacle, and one that is always new. You 
see three soldiers coming at you with a quick 
step, talking and grinning, alert and jaunty, and 
suddenly the upper part of their three bodies be- 
comes rigid, though their legs continue as before, 
apparently of their own volition, and their hands 
go up and their pipes and grins disappear, and 
they pass you with eyes set like dead men's eyes, 
and palms facing you as though they were trying 
to learn which way the wind was blowing. This 
is due, you discover, to the passing of a stout 
gentleman in knickerbockers, who switches his 
rattan stick in the air in reply. Sometimes when 
he salutes the soldier stops altogether, and so his 
walks abroad are punctuated at every twenty 
yards. It takes an ordinary soldier in Gibraltar 
one hour to walk ten minutes. 

Everybody walks in the middle of the main 
street in Gibraltar, because the sidewalks are only 
two feet wide, and because all the streets are as 
clean as the deck of a yacht. Cabs of yellow 
wood and diligences with jangling bells and red 



l8 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

worsted harness gallop through this street and 
sweep the people up against the wall, and long 
lines of goats who leave milk in a natural manner 
at various shops tangle themselves up with long 
lines of little donkeys and longer lines of geese, 
with which the local police struggle valiantly. 
All of these things, troops and goats and yellow 
cabs and polo ponies and dog-carts, and priests 
with curly- brimmed hats, and baggy -breeched 
Moors, and huntsmen in pink coats and Tommies 
in red, and sailors rolling along in blue, make the 
main street of Gibraltar as full of variety as a 
mask ball. 

Of the Gibraltar militant, the fortress and the 
key to the Mediterranean, you can see but the 
little that lies open to you and to every one 
along the ramparts. Of the real defensive works 
of the place you are not allowed to have even a 
guess. The ramparts stretch all along the west- 
ern side of the rock, presenting to the bay a high 
shelving wall which twists and changes its front 
at every hundred yards, and in such an unfriendly 
way that whoever tried to scale its slippery sur- 
face at one point would have a hundred yards of 
ramparts on either side of him, from which two 
sides gunners and infantry could observe his 
efforts with comfort and safety to themselves; 
and from which, when tired of watching him slip 
and scramble, they could and undoubtedly would 
blow him into bits. But they would probably 
save him the trouble of coming so far by doing 
that before he left his vessel in the bay. The 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 



19 



northern face of the 
Rock — that end 
which faces Spain, 
and which makes 
the head of the 
crouching lion — 
shows two long 
rows of teeth cut in 
its surface by con- 
victs of long ago. 
You are allowed to 
walk through these 
dungeons, and to 
look down upon 
the Neutral Ground 
and the little Span- 
ish town at the end 
of its half-mile over 
the butts of great 
guns. And you will 
marvel not so much 

at the engineering skill of whoever it was who 
planned this defence as at the weariness and the 
toil of the criminals who gave up the greater part 
of their lives to hewing and blasting out these 
great galleries and gloomy passages, through 
which your footsteps echo like the report of can- 
non. 

Lower down, on the outside of this mask of 
rock, are more ramparts, built there by man, 
from which infantry could sweep the front of 
the enemy were they to approach from the only 




AN ENGLISH SENTRY 



20 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

point from which a land attack is possible. The 
other side of the Rock, that which faces the 
Mediterranean, is unfortified, except by the big 
guns on the very summit, for no man could scale 
it, and no ball yet made could shatter its front. 
To further protect the north from a land attack 
there is at the base of the Rock and below the 
ramparts a great moat, bridged by an apparently 
solid piece of masonry. This roadway, which 
leads to the north gate of the fortress — the one 
which is closed at six each night — is under- 
mined, and at a word could be blown into peb- 
bles, turning the moat into a great lake of water, , 
and virtually changing the Rock of Gibraltar 
into an island. I never crossed this roadway 
without wondering whether the sentry under- 
neath might not be lighting his pipe near the 
powder-magazine, and I generally reached the 
end of it at a gallop. 

There is still another protection to the North 
Front. It is only the protection which a watch- 
dog gives at night; but a watch-dog is most im- 
portant. He gives you time to sound your burg- 
lar-alarm and to get a pistol from under your pil- 
low. A line of sentries pace the Neutral Ground, 
and have paced it for nearly two hundred years. 
Their sentry-boxes dot the half mile of turf, and 
their red coats move backward and forward night 
and day, and any one who leaves the straight and 
narrow road crossing the Neutral Ground, and 
who comes too near, passes a dead-line and is 
shot. Facing them, a half-mile off, are the white 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 



21 



adobe sentry-boxes of Spain and another row of 
sentries, wearing long blue coats and queer little 
shakos, and smoking cigarettes. And so the 
two great powers watch each other unceasingly 
across the half-mile of turf, and say, '' So far shall 
you go, and no farther ; this belongs to me." 
There is nothing more significant than these two 
rows of sentries ; you notice it whenever you 
cross the Neutral Ground for a ride in Spain. 
First you see the English sentry, rather short 
and very young, but very clean and rigid, and 
scowling fiercely over the chin strap of his big 
white helmet. His shoulder-straps shine with 
pipe -clay and his boots with blacking, and his 
arms are burnished and oily. Taken alone, he is 
a little atom, a molecule ; but he is complete in 
himself, with his food and lodging on his back, and 
his arms ready to his 
hand. He is one of a 
great system that ob- 
tains from India to 
Nova Scotia, and from 
Bermuda to Africa 
and Australia; and he 
shows that he knows 
this in the way in 
which he holds up his 
chin and kicks out his 
legs as he tramps back 
and forward guarding 
the big rock at his 
back. And facing him, 




A SPANISH SENTRY 



22 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

half a mile away, you will see a tall handsome man 
seated on a stone, with the tails of his long coat 
wrapped warmly around his legs, and with his 
gun leaning against another rock while he rolls a 
cigarette ; and then, with his hands in his pock- 
ets, he gazes through the smoke at the sky above 
and the sea on either side, and wonders when he 
will be paid his peseta a day for fighting and 
bleeding for his country. This helps to make 
you understand how six thousand half -starved 
Englishmen held Gibraltar for four years against 
the army of Spain. 

This is about all that you can see of Gibraltar 
as a fortress. You hear, of course, of much more, 
and you can guess at a great deal. Up above, 
where the Signal Station is, and where no one, 
not even an officer in uniform not engaged on the 
works, is allowed to go, are the real fortifications. 
What looks like a rock is a monster gun painted 
gray, or a tree hides the mouth of another. And 
in this forbidden territory are great cannon 
which are worked from the lowest ramparts. 
These are the present triumphs of Gibraltar. 
Before they came, the clouds which shut out the 
sight of the Rock as well as the rest of the world 
from its summit rendered the great pieces of ar- 
tillery there as useless in bad weather as they are 
harmless in times of peace. The very elements 
threatened to war against the English, and a 
shower of rain or a veering wind might have al- 
tered the fortunes of a battle. But a clever man 
named Watkins has invented a position -finder, 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 23 

by means of which those on the lowest ramparts, 
well out of the clouds, can aim the great guns on 
the summit at a vessel unseen by the gunners 
lost in the mist above, and by electricity fire a 
shot from a gun a half-mile above them so that 
it will strike an object many miles off at sea. It 
will be a very strange sensation to the captain of 
such a vessel when he finds her bombarded by 
shells that belch forth from a drifting cloud. 

No stranger has really any idea of the real 
strength of this fortress, or in what part of it its 
real strength lies. Not one out of ten of its 
officers knows it. Gibraltar is a grand and grim 
practical joke ; it is an armed foe like the army 
m Macbeth, v,'h.o came in the semblance of a 
wood, or like the wooden horse of Troy that 
held the pick of the enemy's fighting -men. 
What looks like a solid face of rock is a hanging 
curtain that masks a battery ; the blue waters 
of the bay are treacherous with torpedoes ; and 
every little smiling village of Spain has been 
marked down for destruction, and has had its 
measurements taken as accurately as though the 
English batteries had been playing on it already 
for many years. The Rock is undermined and 
tunnelled throughout, and food and provisions 
are stored away in it to last a siege of seven 
years. Telephones and telegraphs, signal sta- 
tions for flagging, search-lights, and other such 
devilish inventions, have been planted on every 
point, and only the Governor himself knows what 
other modern improvements have been intro- 



24 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

duced into the bowels of this mountain or dis- 
tributed behind bits of landscape gardening on 
its surface. 

On the 25th of February, at half-pAst ten in 
the morning, three guns were fired in rapid suc- 
cession from the top of the Rock, and the win- 
dows shook. Three guns mean that Gibraltar is 
about to be attacked by a fleet of war-ships, and 
that " England expects every man to do his 
duty." So I went out to see him do it. Men 
were running through the streets trailing their 
guns, and officers were galloping about pulling at 
their gloves, and bodies of troops were swinging 
along at a double-quick, which always makes 
them look as though they were walking in tight 
boots, and bugles were calling, and groups of 
men, black and clearly cut against the sky, were 
excitedly switching the air with flags from ev- 
ery jutting rock and every rampart of the garri- 
son. 

Behind the ramparts, quite out of sight of the 
vessels in the bay, were many hundreds of in- 
fantrymen with rifles in hand, and only waiting 
for a signal to appear above the coping of the 
wall to empty their guns into the boats of the 
enemy. The enlisted men, who enjoy this sort 
of play, were pleased and interested ; the officers 
were almost as calm as they would be before a 
real enemy, and very much bored at being called 
out and experimented with. The real object of 
the preparation for defence that morning Avas to 
learn whether the officers at different points could 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 27 

communicate with the Governor as he rode rap- 
idly from one spot to another. This was done 
by means of flags, and although the officer who 
did the flagging for the Governor's party had 
about as much as he could do to keep his horse 
on four legs, the experiment was most successful. 
It was a very pretty and curious sight to see 
men talking a mile away to a party of horsemen 
going at full gallop. 

The life of a subaltern of the British army, 
who belongs to a smart regiment, and who is 
stationed at such a post as Gibraltar, impresses 
you as being as easy and satisfactory a state 
of existence as a young and unmarried man could 
ask. He has always the hope that some day — 
any day, in fact — he will have a chance to see 
active service, and so serve his country and dis- 
tinguish his name. And while waiting for this 
chance he enjoys the good things the world 
brings him with a clear conscience. He has 
duties, it is true, but they did not strike me as 
being wearing ones, or as threatening nervous 
prostration. As far as I could see, his most try- 
ing duty was the number of times a day he had 
to change his clothes, and this had its ameliorat- 
ing circumstance in that he each time changed 
into a more gorgeous costume. There was one 
youth whom I saw in four different suits in two 
hours. When I first noticed him he was coming 
back from polo, in boots and breeches ; then he 
was directing the firing of a gun, with a pill-box 
hat on the side of his head, a large pair of field- 



28 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

glasses in his hand, and covered by a black and 
red uniform that fitted him like a jersey. A 
little later he turned up at a tennis party at the 
Governor's in flannels; and after that he came 
back there to dine in the garb of every evening. 
When the subaltern dines at mess he wears a 
uniform which turns that of the First City Troop 
into what looks in comparison like a second- 
hand and ready-made garment. The ofificers of 
the 13th Somerset Light Infantry wore scarlet 
jackets at dinner, with high black silk waistcoats 
bordered with two inches of gold lace. The 
jackets have gold buttons sewed along every 
edge that presents itself, and offer glorious 
chances for determining one's future by count- 
ing ''poor man, rich man, beggar- man, thief." 
When eighteen of these jackets are placed 
around a table, the chance civilian feels and 
looks like an undertaker. 

Dining at mess is a very serious function in a 
British regiment. At other times her Majesty's 
officers have a reticent air; but at dinner, when 
you are a guest, or whether you are a guest or 
not, there is an intent to please and to be 
pleased which is rather refreshing. 

We have no regimental headquarters in Amer- 
ica, and owing to our officers seeking promotion 
all over the country, the regimental esprit de 
corps is lacking. But in the English army regi- 
mental feeling is very strong; father and son fol- 
low on in the same regiment, and now that they 
are naming them for the counties from which 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 



29 



they are recruited, they are becoming very close 
corporations indeed. At mess the traditions of 
the regiment come into play, and you can learn 
then of the actions in which it has been en- 
gaged from the engravings and paintings around 
the walls, and from the silver plate on the table 
and the flags stacked in the corner. 

When* a man gets his company he presents 
the regiment with a piece of plate, or a silver 
inkstand, or a picture, or something which com- 




CANNONS MASKED BY BUSHES 



memorates a battle or a man, and so the regi- 
mental headquarters are always telling a story 
of what has been in the past and inspiring fine 
deeds for the future. Each regiment has its 
peculiarity of uniform or its custom at mess, 
which is distinctive to it, and which means more 
the longer it is observed. Those in authority 
are trying to do away with these signs and dif- 



30 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

ferences in equipment, and are writing them- 
selves down asses as they do so. 

You will notice, for instance, if you are up in 
such things, that the sergeants of the 13th Light 
Infantry wear their sashes from the left shoulder 
to the right hip, as officers do, and not from the 
right shoulder, as sergeants should. This means 
that once in a great battle every officer of the 
1 3th was killed, and the sergeants, finding this out, 
and that they were now in command, changed 
their sashes to the other shoulder. And the offi- 
cers ever after allowed them to do this, as a 
tribute to their brothers in command who had 
so conspicuously obliterated themselves and dis- 
tinguished their regiment. There are other tra- 
ditions, such as that no one must mention a 
woman's name at mess, except the title of one 
woman, to which they rise and drink at the end 
of the dinner, when the sergeant gives the signal 
to the band-master outside, and his men play 
the national anthem, while the bandmaster 
comes in, as Mr. Kipling describes him in '' The 
Drums of the Fore and Aft," and " takes his 
glass of port-wine with the orfficers." The Six- 
tieth, or the Royal Rifles, for instance, wear no 
marks of rank at the mess, in order to express 
the idea that there they are all equal. This 
regiment had once for its name the King's 
American Rifles, and under that name it took 
Quebec and Montreal, and I had placed in front 
of me at mess one night a little silver statuette 
in the equipment of a Continental soldier, ex- 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 31 

cept that his coat, if it had been colored, would 
have been red, and not blue. He was dated 
1768. In the mess-room are pictures of the regi- 
ment swarming over the heights of Quebec, 
storming the walls of Delhi, and running the 
gauntlet up the Nile as they pressed forward 
to save Gordon. All of this goes to make a sub- 
altern feel things that are good for him to feel. 

Every day at Gibraltar there is tennis, and 
bands playing in the Alameda, and parades, or 
riding -parties across the Neutral Ground into 
Spain, and teas and dinners, at which the young 
ladies of the place dance Spanish dances, and 
twice a week the members of the Calpe Hunt 
meet in Spain, and chase foxes across the worst 
country that any Englishman ever rode over in 
pink. There are no fences, but there are ravines 
and canons and precipices, down and up and over 
which the horses scramble and jump, and over 
which they will, if the rider leaves them alone, 
bring him safely. 

And if you lose the rest of the field, you can go 
to an old Spanish inn like that which Don Quixote 
visited, with drunken muleteers in the court-yard, 
and the dining-room over the stable, and with 
beautiful dark -eyed young women to give you 
omelet and native wine and black bread. Or, 
what is as amusing, you can stop in at the offi- 
cer's guard-room at the North Front, and cheer 
that gentleman's loneliness by taking tea with 
him, and drying your things before his fire while 
he cuts the cake, and the women of the party 



32 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

straighten their hats in front of his glass, and 
two Tommies go off for hot water. 

There was a very entertaining officer guarding 
the North Front one night, and he proved so en- 
tertaining that neither of us heard the sunset gun, 
and so when I reached the gate I found it locked, 
and the bugler of the guard who take the keys to 
the Governor each night was sounding his bugle 
half-way up the town. There was a dark object 
on a wall to which I addressed all my arguments 
and explanations, which the object met with re- 
peated requests to " move on, now," in the tone 
of expostulation with which a London policeman 
addresses a very drunken man. 

I knew that if I tried to cross the Neutral 
Ground I would be shot at for a smuggler; for, 
owing to Gibraltar's being a free port of entry, 
these gentlemen buy tobacco there, and carry it 
home each night, or run it across the half-mile of 
Neutral Ground strapped to the backs of dogs. 
So I wandered back again to the entertaining 
officer, and he was filled with remorse, and sent 
off a note of entreaty to his Excellency's repre- 
sentative, to whom he referred as a D. A. A. G., 
and whose name, he said, was Jones. We then 
went to the mess of the officers guarding the 
different approaches, and these gentlemen kindly 
offered me their own beds, proposing that they 
themselves should sleep on three chairs and a 
pile of overcoats ; all except one subaltern, who 
excused his silence by saying diffidently that he 
fancied I would not care to sleep in the fever 



THE ROCK OF GIBRALTAR 35 

camp, of which he had charge. I had seen the 
officer of the keys pass every night, and the 
guards turn out to sakite the keys, and I had 
rather imagined that it was more or less of a 
form, and that the pomp and circumstance were 
all there was of it. I did not believe that the 
Rock was really closed up at night like a safe 
with a combination lock. But I know now that 
it is. A note came back from the mysterious 
D. A. A. G. saying I could be admitted at elev- 
en ; but it said nothing at all about sentries, nor 
did the entertaining officer. Subalterns always 
say ''Officer" when challenged, and the sentry 
always murmurs, '' Pass, officer, and all's well," 
in an apologetic growl. But I suppose I did 
not say " Officer" as I had been told to do, with 
any show of confidence, for every sentry who ap- 
peared that night — and there seemed to be a 
regiment of them — would not have it at all, and 
wanted further data, and wanted it quick. Even 
if you have an order from a D. A. A. G. named 
Jones, it is very difficult to explain about it 
when you don't know whether to speak of him 
as the D. A. A. G. or as General Jones, and 
especially when a young and inexperienced 
shadow is twisting his gun about so that the 
moonlight plays up and down the very longest 
bayonet ever issued by a civilized nation. They 
were not nice sentries, either, like those on the 
Rock, who stand where you can see them, and 
who challenge you drowsily, like cabmen, and 
make the empty streets less lonely than otherwise. 



36 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

They were, on the contrary, fierce and in a 
terrible hurry, and had a way of jumping out of 
the shadow with a rattle of the gun and a shout 
that brought nerve-storms in successive shocks. 
To make it worse, I had gone over the post, 
while waiting for word from the D. A. A. G., to 
hear the sentries recite their instructions to the 
entertaining officer. They did this rather badly, 
I thought, the only portion of the rules, indeed, 
which they seemed to have by heart being those 
which bade them not to allow cows to trespass 
''without a permit," which must have impressed 
them by its humor, and the fact that when ap- 
proached within fifty yards they were "to fire 
low." I found when challenged that night that 
this was the only part of their instructions that I 
also could remember. 

This was the only trying experience of my 
stay in Gibraltar, and it is brought in here as a 
compliment to the force that guards the North 
Front. For of them, and the rest of the inhab- 
itants and officers of the garrison, any one who 
visits there can only think well ; and I hope 
when the Rock is attacked, as it never will be, 
that they will all cover themselves with glory. 
It never will be attacked, for the reason that the 
American people are the only people clever 
enough to invent a way of taking it, and they 
are far too clever to attempt an impossible 
thing. 



II 



TANGIER 




GREAT many thousand years ago 
Hercules built the mountain of Ab- 
yla and its twin mountain which we 
call Gibraltar. It was supposed to 
mark the limits of the unknown 
world, and it would seem from casual inspection, 
as I suggested in the last chapter, that it serves 
the same purpose to this day. Men have crept 
into Africa and crept out again, like flies over a 
ceiling, and they have gained much renown at 
Africa's expense for having done so. They have 
built little towns along its coasts, and run little 
rocking, bumping railroads into its forests, and 
dragged launches over its cataracts, and parti- 
tioned it off among emperors and powers and 
trading companies, without having ventured into 
the countries they pretend to have subdued. 
But from Paul du Chaillu to W. A. Chanler, '' the 
Last Explorer," as he has been called, just how 
much more do we know of Africa than did the 
Romans whose bridges still stand in Tangier? 
The ''Last Explorer" sounds well, and is dis- 



38 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

tinctly a viot^ but there will be other explorers 
to go, and perhaps to return. There are still a 
few things for us to learn. The Spaniards and 
the Pilgrim fathers touched the unknown world 
of America only four hundred years ago, and to- 
day any commercial traveller can tell you, with 
the aid of an A B C railroad guide, the name of 
every town in any part of it. But Turks and 
Romans and Spaniards, and, of late, English and 
Germans and French, have been pecking and 
nibbling at Africa like little mice around a 
cheese, and they are still nibbling at the rind, 
and know as little of the people they " protect," 
and of the countries they have annexed and col- 
onized, as did Hannibal and Scipio. The Amer- 
ican forests have been turned into railroad ties 
and telegraph poles, and the American Indian 
has been "exterminated" or taught to plough 
and to wear a high hat. The cowboy rides free- 
ly over the prairies; the Indian agent cheats the 
Indian — the Indian does not cheat him; the 
Germans own Milwaukee and Cincinnati ; the 
Irish rule everywhere; even the much -abused 
Chinaman hangs out his red sign in every corner 
of the country. There is not a nation of the 
globe that has not its hold upon and does not 
make fortunes out of the continent of America; 
but the continent of Africa remains just as it 
was, holding back its secret, and still content to 
be the unknown world. 

You need not travel far into Africa to learn 
this ; you can find out how little we know of it 



TANGIER 



39 



at its very shore. This city of Tangier, lying 
but three hours off from Gibraltar's civiHzation, 
on the nearest coast of Africa, can teach you 
how little we or our civilized contemporaries un- 
derstand of these barbarians and of their bar- 
barous ways. 

A few months since England sent her ambas- 
sador to treat with the Sultan of Morocco ; it 
was an untaught blackamoor opposed to a dip- 
lomat and a gentleman, and a representative 
of the most civilized and powerful of empires ; 
and we have Stephen Bonsai's picture of this 
ambassador and his suite riding back along the 
hot, sandy trail from Fez, baffled and ridiculed 
and beaten. So that when I was in Tangier, 
half- naked Moors, taking every white stranger 
for an Englishman, would point a finger at me 
and cry, '' Your Sultana a fool ; the Sultan only 
wise." Which shows what a superior people we 
are when we get away from home, and how well 
the English understand the people they like to 
protect. 

Tangier lies like a mass of drifted snow on the 
green hills below, and over the point of rock on 
which stands its fortress, and from which waves 
the square red flag of Morocco. It is a fine 
place spoiled by civilization. And not a nice 
quality of civilization either. Back of it, in 
Tetuan or Fez, you can understand what Tan- 
gier once was and see the Moor at his best. 
There he lives in the exclusiveness which his re- 
ligion teaches him is right — an exclusiveness to 



40 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

which the hauteur of an Enghshman, and his 
fear that some one is going to speak to him on 
purpose, become a gracious manner and suggest 
undue famiharity. You see the Moor at his best 
in Tangier too, but he is never in his complete 
setting as he is in the inland cities, for when 
you walk abroad in Tangier you are constantly 
brought back to the new world by the presence 
and abodes of the foreign element ; a French 
shop window touches a bazar, and a Moor in his 
finest robes is followed by a Spaniard in his 
black cape or an Englishman in a tweed suit, 
for the Englishman learns nothing and forgets 
nothing. He may live in Tangier for years, but 
he never learns to wear a burnoose, or forgets 
to put on the coat his tailor has sent him from 
home as the latest in fashion. The first thing 
which meets your eye on entering the harbor at 
Tangier is an immense blue-and-white enamel 
sign asking you to patronize the English store 
for groceries and provisions. It strikes you as 
much more barbarous than the Moors who come 
scrambling over the vessel's side. 

They come with a rush and with wild yells be- 
fore the little steamer has stopped moving, and 
remind you of their piratical ancestors. They 
look quite as fierce, and as they throw their 
brown bare legs over the bulwarks and leap and 
scramble, pushing and shouting in apparently 
the keenest stage of excitement and rage, they 
only need long knives between their teeth and a 
cutlass to convince you that you are at the 



/ 




BREAD MERCHANTS AT THE GATE 



TANGIER 43 

mercy of the Barbary pirates, and not merely of 
hotel porters and guides. 

My guide was a Moor named Mahamed. I 
had him about a week, or rather, to speak quite 
correctly, he had me. I do not know how he ef- 
fected my capture, but he went with me, I think, 
because no one else would have him, and he ac- 
cordingly imposed on my good-nature. As we 
say a man is "good-natured" when there is ab- 
solutely nothing else to be said for him, I hope 
when I say this that I shall not be accused of 
trying to pay myself a compliment. Mahamed 
was a tall Moor, with a fine array of different- 
colored robes and coats and undercoats, and a 
large white turban around his fez, which marked 
the fact that he was either married or that he 
had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. He followed 
me from morning until night, with the fidelity of 
a lamb, and with its sheeplike stupidity. No 
amount of argument or money or abuse could 
make him leave my side. Mahamed was not 
even picturesque, for he wore a large pair of 
blue spectacles and Congress gaiters. This hurt 
my sense of the fitness of things very much. 
His idea of serving me was to rush on ahead 
and shove all the little donkeys and blind beg- 
gars and children out of my way, at which the 
latter would weep, and I would have to go back 
and bribe them into cheerfulness again. In this 
way he made me most unpopular with the 
masses, and cost me a great deal in trying to buy 
their favor. I was never so completely at the 



44 I'HE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

mercy of any one before, and I hope he found 
me ''intelligent, courteous, and a good linguist." 
As a matter of fact, there is very little need of 
a guide in Tangier. It has but few show places, 
for the place itself is the show. You can find 
your best entertainment in picking your way 
through its winding, narrow streets, and in wan- 
dering about the open market-places. The high- 
ways of Tangier are all very crooked and very 
steep. They are also very uneven and dirty, and 
one walks sometimes for hundreds of yards in a 
maze of dark alleys and little passageways walled 
in by whitewashed walls, and sheltered from the 
sun by archways and living-rooms hanging from 
one side of the street to the other. Green and 
blue doorways, through which one must stoop 
to enter, open in from the street, and you are 
constantly hearing them shut as you pass, as 
some of the women of the household recognize 
the presence of a foreigner. You are never quite 
sure as to what you will meet in the streets or 
what may be displayed at your elbow before the 
doors of the bazars. The odors of frying meat 
and of fresh fruit and of herbs, and of soap in- 
great baskets, and of black coffee and hasheesh, 
come to you from cafes and tiny shops hardly as 
big as a packing -box. These are shut up at 
night by two half-doors, of which the upper one 
serves as a shield from the sun by day and the 
lower as a pair of steps. In the wider streets 
are the bazars, magnificent with color and with 
the glitter of gold lace and of brass plaques and 



TANGIER 45 

silver daggers; handsome, comfortable -looking 
Moors sit crossed -legged in the middle of their 
small extent like soldiers in a sentry-box, and 
speak leisurely with their next - door neighbor 
without gesture, unless they grow excited over a 
bargain, and with a haughty contempt for the 
passing Christian. There is always something 
beneficial in feeling that you are thoroughly de- 
spised ; and when a whole community combines 
to despise you, and looks over your head gravely 
as you pass, you begin to feel that those Moors 
who do not apparently hold you in contempt are 
a very poor and middle-class sort of people, and 
you would much prefer to be overlooked by a 
proud Moor than shaken hands with by a per- 
verted one. But the pride of the rich Moorish 
gentlemen is nothing compared to the fanatic in- 
tolerance of the poor farmers from the country 
of the tribes who come in on market-day, and 
who hate the Christian properly as the Koran 
tells them they should. They stalk through the 
narrow street with both eyes fixed on a point far 
ahead of them, with head and shoulders erect 
and arms swinging. They brush against you as 
though you were a camel or a horse, and had 
four legs on which to stand instead of two. 
Sometimes a foreigner forgets that these men 
from the desert, where the foreign element has 
not come, are following out the religious train- 
ing of a lifetime, and strikes at one of them with 
his riding-whip, and then takes refuge in a con- 
sulate and leaves on the next boat. 



46 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

I find it very hard not to sympathize with the 
Moors. The EngHshman is always preaching 
that an EngHshman's house is his castle, and yet 
he invades this country, he and his French and 
Spanish and American cousins, and demands 
that not only he shall be treated well, but that 
any native of the country, any subject of the 
Sultan, who chooses to call himself an American 
or an Englishman shall be protected too. Of 
course he knows that he is not wanted there ; 
he knows he is forcing himself on the barbarian, 
and that all the barbarian has ever asked of him 
is to be let alone. But he comes, and he rides 
around in his baggy breeches and varnished 
boots, and he gets up polo games and cricket 
matches, and gallops about in a pink coat after 
foxes, and asks for bitter ale, and complains be- 
cause he cannot get his bath, and all the rest 
of it, quite as if he had been begged to come 
and to stop as long as he liked. Sometimes you 
find a foreigner who tries to learn something of 
these people, a man like the late Mr. Leared or 
" Bebe " Carleton, who can speak all their dia- 
lects, and who has more power with the Sultan 
than has any foreign minister, and who, if the 
Sultan will not pay you for the last shipment of 
guns you sent him, or for the grand -piano for 
the harem, is the man to get you your money. 
But the average foreign resident, as far as I can 
see, neither adopts the best that the Moor has 
found good, nor introduces what the Moor most 
needs, and what he does not know or care 



TANGIER 



47 



enough about to Introduce for himself. Tan- 
gier, for instance, is excellently adapted by nat- 
ure for the purposes of good sanitation, but 
the arrangements are as bad and primitive as 
they were before a foreigner came into the 
place. They consist in dumping the refuse of 
the streets, into which everything is thrown, over 
the sea-wall out on the rocks below, where the 
pigs gather up what they want, and the waves 
wash the remainder back on the coast. 




SANITARY OUTFIT DUMPING REFUSE OVER THE WALL 



If some of the foreign ministers would use 
their undoubted influence with the Bashaw to 
amend this, instead of introducing point-to-point 
pony races, they might in time show some rea- 
son for their invasion of Morocco other than the 
curious and obvious one that they all grow rich 
there while doing nothing. The foreign resident 
has a very great contempt for the Moor. He 



48 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

says the Moor is a great liar and a rogue. When 
people used to ask Walter Scott if it was he who 
wrote the Waverley Novels he used to tell them 
it was not, and he excused this afterwards by say- 
ing that if you are asked an impertinent or im- 
possible question you have the right not to an- 
swer it or to tell an untruth. The very presence, 
of the foreigner is an impertinence in the eyes 
of the Moor, and so he naturally does not feel 
severe remorse when he baffles the foreign in- 
vader, and does it whenever he can. 

As a matter of fact, the foreign invader at 
Tangier is not, in a number of cases, in a posi- 
tion in which he can gracefully throw down 
gauntlets. There is something about these hot, 
raw countries, hidden out of the way of public 
opinion and police courts and the respectability 
which drives a gig, that makes people forget the 
rules and axioms laid down in 'the temperate 
zone for the guidance of tax-payers and all rep- 
utable citizens. As the sailors say, " There is no 
Sunday south of the equator.'' It is hard to tell 
just what it is, but the sun, or the example of 
the barbarians, or the fact that the world is so 
far away, breeds queer ideas, and one hears 
stories one would not care to print as long as 
the law of libel obtains in the land. You have 
often read in novels, especially French novels, or 
have heard men on the stage say: ^' Come, let us 
leave this place, with its unjust laws and cruel 
bigotry. We will go to some unknown corner 
of the earth, where we will make a new home. 



TANGIER 



49 



And there, under a new flag and a new name, we 
will forget the sad past, and enter into a new 
world of happiness and content." 

When you hear a man on the stage say that, 
you can make up your mind that he is going to 
Tangier. It may be that he goes there with 
somebody else's money, or somebody else's wife, 
or that he has had trouble with a check; or, as 
in the case of one young man who was feted and 
dined there, had robbed a diamond store in 
Brooklyn, and is now in Sing Sing; or, as in the 
case of a recent American consul, had sold his 
protection for two hundred dollars to any one 
who wanted it, and was recalled under several 
clouds. And you hear stories of ministers who 
retire after receiving an income of a few hundred 
pounds a year with two hundred thousand dol- 
lars they have saved out of it, and of cruelty and 
bursts of sudden passion that would undoubted- 
ly cause a lynching in the chivalric and civilized 
states of Alabama or Tennessee. And so when 
I heard why several of the people of Tangier had 
come there, and why they did not go away again, 
I began to feel that the barbarian, whose forefa- 
thers swept Spain and terrorized the whole of 
Catholic Europe, had more reason than he knew 
for despising the Christian who is waiting to give 
to his country the benefits of civilization. 

Tangier's beauty lies in so many different 

things — in the monk-like garb of the men and 

in the white muffled figures of the women; in the 

brilliancy of its sky, and of the sea dashing upon 

4 



50 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

the rocks and tossing the feluccas with their 
three-cornered sails from side to side ; and in the 
green towers of the mosques, and the listless 
leaves of the royal palms rising from the centre 
of a mass of white roofs; and, above all, in the 
color and movement of the bazars and streets. 
The streets represent absolute equality. They 
are at the widest but three yards across, and 
every one pushes, and apparently every one has 
something to sell, or at least something to say, 
for they all talk and shout at once, and cry at 
their donkeys or abuse whoever touches them. 
A water-carrier, with his goat -skin bag on his 
back and his finger on the tube through which 
the water comes, jostles you on one side, and a 
slave as black and shiny as a patent-leather boot 
shoves you on the other as he makes way for his 
master on a fine white Arabian horse with brill- 
iant trappings and a huge contempt for the don- 
keys in his way. It is worth going to Tangier if 
for no other reason than to see a slave, and to 
grasp the fact that he costs anywhere from a hun- 
dred to five hundred dollars. To the older gen- 
eration this may not seem worth while, but to 
the present generation — those of it who were 
born after Richmond was taken — it is a new and 
momentous sensation to look at a man as fine and 
stalwart and human as one of your own people, 
and feel that he cannot strike for higher wages, 
or even serve as a parlor-car porter or own a bar- 
ber-shop, but must work out for life the two hun- 
dred dollars his owner paid for him at Fez. 



TANGIER 51 

There is more movement in Tangier than I 
have ever noticed in a place of its size. Every- 
one is either looking on cross-legged from the 
bazars and coffee-shops, or rushing, pushing, and 
screaming in the street. It is most bewildering; 
if you turn to look after a particularly magnifi- 
cent Moor, or a half- naked holy man from the 
desert with wild eyes and hair as long as a horse's 
mane, you are trodden upon by a string of don- 
keys carrying kegs of water, or pushed to one 
side by a soldier with a gun eight feet long. 

There is something continually interesting in 
the muffled figures of the women. They make 
you almost ashamed of the uncovered faces of the 
American women in the town; and, in the lack of 
any evidence to the contrary, you begin to be- 
lieve every Moorish woman or girl you meet is 
as beautiful as her eyes would make it appear 
that she is. Those of the Moorish girls whose 
faces I saw were distinctly handsome; they were 
the women Benjamin Constant paints in his pict- 
ures of Algiers, and about whom Pierre Loti goes 
into ecstasies in his book on Tangier. Their robe 
or cloak, or w^hatever the thing is that they affect, 
covers the head like a hood, and with one hand 
they hold one of its folds in front of the face as 
high as their eyes, or keep it in place by biting 
it between their teeth. 

The only time that I ever saw the face of 
any of them w^as when I occasionally eluded 
Mahamed and ran off with a little guide called 
Isaac, the especial protector of tw^o American 



52 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

women, who farmed him out to me when they 
preferred to remain in the hotel. He is a par- 
ticularly beautiful youth, and I noticed that 
whenever he was with me the cloaks of the wom- 
en had a fashion of coming undone, and they 
would lower them for an instant and look at 
Isaac, and then replace them severely upon the 
bridge of the nose. Then Isaac would turn tow- 
ards me with a shy conscious smile and blush vi- 
olently. Isaac says that the young men of Tan- 
gier can tell whether or not a girl is pretty by 
looking at her feet. It is true that their feet are 
bare, but it struck me as being a somewhat reck- 
less test for selecting a bride. I will recommend 
Isaac to whoever thinks of going to Tangier. 
He speaks eight languages, is eighteen years old, 
wears beautiful and barbarous garments, and is 
always happy. He is especially good at making 
bargains, and he entertained me for many half- 
hours while I sat and watched him fighting over 
two dollars more or less with the proprietors of 
the bazars. He was an antagonist worthy of the 
oldest and proudest Moor in Tangier. He had 
no respect for their rage or their contempt or 
their proffered bribes or their long white beards. 
Sometimes he would laugh them to scorn — them 
and their prices; and again he would talk to them 
sadly and plaintively ; and again he would stamp 
and rage and slap his hands at them and rush off 
with a great show of disgust, until they called him 
back again, when he and they would go over the 
performance once more with unabated interest. 



TANGIER 53 

Mahamed always paid them what they asked, 
and got his commission from them later, as a 
guide should ; but Isaac would storm and finally 
beat them down one-half. Isaac can be found at 
the Calpe Hotel, and is welcome to whatever this 
notice may be worth to him. 




A WOMAN OF TANGIER 



I had read in books on Morocco and had been 
given to understand that when you were told 
that the price of anything in a bazar was worth 
three dollars, you should offer one, and that then 
the Moor would cry aloud to Allah to take note 
of the insult, and would ask you to sit down and 
have a cup of coffee, and that he would then beat 
you up and you would beat him down, and that 
at the end of two or three hours you would get 
what you wanted for two dollars. It struck me 



54 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

that this, if one had several months to spare and 
wanted anything badly enough, might be rather 
amusing. The first thing I saw that I wanted 
badly was a long gun, for which the Moor asked 
me twelve dollars. I offered him eight. I then 
waited to see him tear his beard and unwrap his 
turban and cry aloud to Allah; but he did none 
of these things. He merely put the gun back in 
its place and continued the conversation, which I 
had so flippantly interrupted, with a long-bearded 
friend. And no further remarks on my part af- 
fected him in the least, and I was forced to go 
away feeling very much ashamed and very mean. 
The next day a man at the hotel brought in the 
gun, having paid fourteen dollars for it, and said 
he would not sell it for fifty. We would pay 
much more than that for it at home, which shows 
that you cannot always follow guide-books. 

There are only five things the guides take you 
to see in Tangier — the cafe chantant, the govern- 
or's palace, the prisons, and the harem, to which 
men are not admitted. They also take you to 
see the markets, but you can see them for your- 
self. The markets are bare, open places covered 
with stones and lined with bazars, and on market- 
days peopled with thousands of muffled figures 
selling or trying to sell herbs and eggs and every- 
thing else that is eatable, from dates to haunches 
of mutton. It is a wonderfully picturesque sight, 
with the sun trickling through the palm-leaf mats 
overhead on the piles of yellow melons at your 
feet, and with strings of camels dislocating their 



TANGIER 55 

countenances over their grain, and dancing-men 
and snake-charmers and story-tellers, as eloquent 
as actors, clamoring on every side. 

The cafe chantant is a long room lined with 
mats, and with rugs scattered over the floor, on 
which sit musicians and the regular customers of 
the place, who play cards and smoke long pipes, 
with which they rap continually on the tin ash- 
holders. The music is very strange, to say the 
least, and the singing very startling, full of sudden 
pauses, and beginning again after one of these 
when you think the song is over. It is not a par- 
ticularly exciting place to visit, but there is no 
choice between that and the hotel smoking-room. 
Tangier is not a town where one can move about 
much at night. There is also a place where the 
guests tell you that you can see Moorish women 
dance the dance which so startled Paris in the 
Algerian exhibit at the exposition. As I had no 
desire to be startled in that way again, I did not 
go to see them, and so cannot say what they are 
like. But it is quite safe to say that any visitor 
to Tangier who thinks he is seeing anything that 
is real and native to the home life of the people, 
and that is not a show gotten up by the guides, 
is going to be greatly taken in. The harem to 
which they lead women is not a harem at all, but 
the home of the widow of an ex-governor, who 
sits with her daughters for strange women to 
look at. It is a most undignified proceeding on 
the part of the widow of a dead Bashaw, and no 
one but the guides know what she is doing. I 



56 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

came to find out about it through some American 
women who went there with Isaac in the morn- 
ing, and were taken to call at the same place by 
an English lady resident in the afternoon. The 
English woman laughed at them for thinking 
they had seen the interior of a harem, and they 
did not tell her that they had already visited her 
friends and paid their franc for admittance to 
their society. 

The other show places are the governor's pal- 
ace and the prisons. The palace is a very hand- 
some Moorish building, and the prisons are very 
dirty. All that the tourist can see of them is the 
little he can discern through a hole cut in the 
stout wooden door of each, which is the only exit 
and entrance. You cannot see much even then, 
for the prisoners, as soon as they discover a face at 
the opening, stick it full of the palm-leaf baskets 
that they make and sell in order to buy food. 
The government gives them neither water, which 
is expensive in Tangier, nor bread, unless they 
are dying for want of it, but expects the family 
or friends of each criminal to see that he is kept 
alive until he has served out his term of impris- 
onment. 

A great deal has been written about these pris- 
ons of the Sultan, and of the cruelty shown to 
the inmates, notably of late by a Mr. Mackenzie 
in the London Times. You are told that in Tan- 
gier, within the four square walls of the prison, 
there are madmen and half -starved murderers 
and rebels, loaded with chains, dying of disease 




WATER 



„ AT THF DOOR OF 
7R- VENDER Al TUl^ 



? A PRIVATE HOUSE 



TANGIER 59 

and want, who are tortured and starved until 
they die. For this reason no one in Morocco is 
sentenced for more than ten or twelve years, so 
you are told, because he is sure to die before that 
time has expired. It seemed to me that if this 
were true it would be worth while to visit the 
prison and to tell what one saw there. When I 
was informed that, with the exception of two 
residents of Tangier, no one has been allowed to 
enter the Sultan's prison for the last ten years, I 
suspected that there must be something there 
which the Sultan did not want seen : it was not 
a difficult deduction to make. So I set about 
getting into the prison. It is not at all necessary 
to go into the details of my endeavors, or to tell 
what proposals I made ; it is quite sufficient to 
say that in every way I was eminently unsuccess- 
ful. It was interesting, however, to find a people 
to whom the arguments and inducements which 
had proved effective with one's own countrymen 
were foolish and incomprehensible. For two 
days I haunted the outer walls of the prison, and 
was smiled upon contemptuously by the Bashaw's 
counsellors, who sat calmly in the cool hallway of 
the palace, and watched me kicking impatiently 
at the stones in the court-yard and broiling in the 
sun, while the governor or Bashaw returned me 
polite expressions of his regret. I finally dragged 
the Consul-General into it, and brought things to 
such a pass that I could see no way out of it but 
my admittance to the prison or a declaration of 
war from the United States. 



6o THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

Either event seemed to promise exciting and 
sensational developments. Colonel Mathews, the 
Consul-General, did not, however, share my views, 
but arranged that I should have an audience with 
the Bashaw, during the course of which he prom- 
ised he would bring up the question of my ad- 
mittance to the prison. 

On board the Fulda, I had had the pleasure of 
sitting at table next to the Rev. Dr. Henry M. 
Field, the editor of the Evangelist, and a distin- 
guished traveller in many lands. While on the 
steamer I had twitted the doctor with not having 
seen certain phases of life with which, it seemed 
to me, he should be more familiar, and I offered, 
on finding we were making the same tour for the 
same purpose, to introduce him to bull-fights and 
pig-sticking and cafes chantants, and other inci- 
dents of foreign travel, of which he seemed to be 
ignorant. He refused my offer with dignity, but 
I think with some regret. I was, nevertheless, 
glad to find that he was in Tangier, and that he 
was to be one of the party to call at the govern- 
or's palace. On learning of my desire to visit the 
prison Dr. Field added his petition to mine, and 
I am quite sure that Colonel Mathews wished we 
were both in the United States. 

We first called upon the Sultan's Minister of 
Foreign Affairs, who received us in a little room 
leading from a pretty portico near the street en- 
trance. It was furnished, I was pained to note, 
not with divans and rugs, but with a set of red 
plush and walnut sofas and chairs, such as you 



TANGIER 6 1 

would find in the salon of a third-rate French 
hotel. The Minister of Foreign Affairs was a 
dear, kindly old gentleman, with a fine white 
beard down to his waist, but he had a cold in 
his head, and this kept him dabbing at his nose 
with a red bandanna handkerchief rolled up in a 
ball, which was not in keeping with the rest of 
his costume, nor with the dignity of his appear- 
ance. He and Dr. Field got on very well ; they 
found out that they were both seventy years of 
age, and both highly esteemed in their different 
churches. Indeed, the Minister of Foreign Af- 
fairs was good enough to say, through Colonel 
Mathews, that Dr. Field had a good face, and 
one that showed he had led a religious life. He 
rather neglected me, and I was out of it, espe- 
cially when both the doctor and the cabinet min- 
ister began hoping that Allah would bless them 
both. I thought it most unorthodox language 
for Dr. Field to use. 

We then walked up the hill upon which stand 
the fort, the prisons, the treasury, and the gov- 
ernor's palace, and were received at the entrance 
to the latter by the same gentlemen who had for 
the last two days been enjoying my discomfit- 
ure. They were now most gracious in their 
manner, and bowed proudly and respectfully to 
Colonel Mathews as we passed between two rows 
of them and entered the hall of the palace. We 
went through three halls covered with colored 
tiles and topped with arches of ornamental scroll- 
work of intricate designs. At the extreme end 



62 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

of these rooms the Bashaw stood waiting for us. 
He was the finest-looking Moor I had seen ; and 
I think the Moorish gentleman, though it seems 
a strange thing to say, is the most perfect type 
of a gentleman that I have seen in any country. 
He is seldom less than six feet tall, and he car- 
ries his six feet with the erectness of a soldier 
and with the grace of a woman. The bones of 
his face are strong and well-placed, and he looks 
kind and properly self-respecting, and is always 
courteous. When you add to this clothing as 
brilliant and robes as clean and soft and white as 
a bride's, you have a very worthy-looking man. 
The Bashaw towered above all of us. He wore 
brown and dark-blue cloaks, with a long under- 
waistcoat of light-blue silk, yellow shoes, and a 
white turban as big as a bucket, and his baggy 
trousers were as voluminous as Letty Lind's di- 
vided skirts. He could not speak English, but 
he shook hands with us, which Moors do not do 
to one another, and walked on ahead through 
court-yards and halls and up stairways to a lit- 
tle room filled with divans and decorated with a 
carved ceiling and tiled walls. There we all sat 
down, and a soldier in a long red cloak and with 
numerous swords sticking out of his person gave 
us tea, and sweet cakes made entirely of sugar. 
As soon as we had finished one cup he brought in 
another, and, noticing this, I indulged sparingly; 
but the doctor finished his first, and then refused 
the rest, until the Consul -General told him he 
must drink or be guilty of a breach of etiquette. 



TANGIER 



63 




A STREET DANCER 



The Bashaw and 
Colonel Mathews 
talked together, 
and we paid the 
governor long and 
laborious compli- 
ments, at which he 
smiled indulgently. 
He did not strike - 
me as being at all 
overcome by them ; J- 
he had, on the con- 
trary, very much . 
the air of a man I 
of the world, and 
seemed rather to 
be bored, but too 

polite to say so. He looked exactly like Salvini 
as Othello. While the tea -drinking was going 
on we were making asides to Colonel Mathews, 
and urging him to propose our going into the 
prison, which he said he would do, but that it 
must be done diplomatically. We told him we 
would give all the prisoners bread and water, 
or a lump sum to the guards, or whatever he 
thought would please the Bashaw best. He 
and the Bashaw then began to talk about it, 
and the doctor and I looked consciously at the 
ceiling. The Bashaw said that never since^he had 
been governor of Tangier had he allowed either 
a native or a foreigner to enter the prison ; and 
that if a European did so, he would be torn to 



64 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

pieces by the fanatics imprisoned there, who 
would think they were pleasing Allah by abusing 
an unbeliever. Colonel Mathews also added, on 
his own account, that we would probably catch 
some horrible disease. The more they did not 
want us to go, the more we wanted to go, the 
doctor rising to the occasion with a keenness and 
readiness of resource worthy of a New York re- 
porter after a beat. I can pay him no higher 
compliment. After a long, loud, and excited de- 
bate the Bashaw submitted, and the Consul-Gen- 
eral won. 

The first prison they showed us was the county 
jail, in which men are placed for a month or more. 
It was dirty and uninteresting, and we protested 
that it was not the one which the Bashaw had de- 
scribed, and asked to be shown the one where 
the enemies of the government were incarcer- 
ated. Colonel Mathews called back the Bashaw's 
soldiers, and we went on to the larger prison im- 
mediately adjoining. Some time ago the inmates 
of this made a break for liberty, and forced open 
the one door which bars those inside from the 
outer world. The guards fired into the mass of 
them, and the place shows where the bullets 
struck. To prevent a repetition of this, three 
heavy bars were driven into the masonry around 
the door, so close together that it is impossible 
for more than one man to leave or enter the 
prison at one time even when the door is open. 
And the opening is so small that to do this he 
must either crawl in on his hands and knees, or 



TANGIER 65 

lift himself up by the crossbar and swing himself 
in feet foremost. It impressed me as a particu- 
larly embarrassing way to make an entrance 
among a lot of people who meditated tearing 
you to pieces. I pointed this out to the doctor, 
but he was determined, though pale. So the 
guards swung the door in, and the first glimpse 
of a Christian gentleman the prisoners had in ten 
years was a pair of yellow riding -boots which 
shot into space, followed by a young man, and a 
moment later by an elderly gentleman with a 
white tie. We made a combined movement to 
the middle of the prison, which was lighted from 
above by a square opening in the roof, protected 
by iron bars. This was the only light in the 
place. All around the four sides of the patio or 
court were rows of pillars supporting a portico, 
and back of these was a second and outer corri- 
dor opening into the porticos, and so into the 
patio. The whole place — patio, porticos, and 
outer corridor — was about as big as the stage of 
a New York theatre. It was paved with dirt and 
broken slabs, and littered with straw. There was 
no furniture of any sort. With the exception of 
the sink upon which we stood, directly under the 
opening in the roof, the place was in almost com- 
plete darkness, although the sun was shining brill- 
iantly outside. 

I think there must have been about fifty or 

sixty men in the prison, and for a short time not 

one of them moved. They were apparently, to 

judge by the way they looked at us, as much 

5 



66 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

startled as though we had ascended from a trap 
like goblins in a pantomime, and then half of 
them, with one accord, came scrambling towards 
us on their hands and knees. They were half 
naked, and their hair hung down over their eyes; 
and this, and their crawling towards us instead of 
walking, made them look more or less like ani- 
mals. As they came forward there was a clank- 
ing of chains, and I saw that it was because their 
legs were fettered that they came as they did, 
and not standing erect like human beings. The 
guard who followed us in was over two minutes 
in getting the door fastened behind him, and my 
mind was more occupied with this fact than with 
what I saw before me ; for it seemed to me that 
if there was any tearing to pieces to be gone 
through with, I should hate to have to wait that 
long while the door was being opened again. This 
thought, with the shock of seeing thirty wild men 
moving upon us out of complete darkness on 
their hands and knees, was the only sensation of 
any interest that I received while visiting the 
prison. 

The inmates looked exactly like the poorer of 
the Moors outside, except that their hair was 
longer and their clothing was not so white. There 
was one man, however, quite as well dressed as 
any of the Sultan's counsellors, and he seemed to 
be the only one who objected to our presence. 
The rest did nothing except to gratify their curi- 
osity by staring at us ; they did not even hold 
out their hands for money. They were very dirty 




IN THE FKISON 



TANGIER 69 

and poorly clothed, and their long imprisonment 
had made them haggard and pale, and the iron 
bars around their legs gave them a certain inter- 
est. The atmosphere of the place was horribly- 
foul, but not worse than the atmosphere of either 
the men's or women's ward at night in a precinct 
station-house in New York city. Indeed, I was 
not so much impressed with the horrors of the 
Sultan's prison as with the fact that our own are 
so little better, considering our advanced civiliza- 
tion. I do not mean our large prisons, but the 
cells and the vagrants' rooms in the police sta- 
tions. There the vagrant is given a sloping board 
and no ventilation. In Tangier he is given straw 
and an opening in the roof. To be fair, you must 
compare a prisoner's condition in jail with that 
which he is accustomed to in his own home, and 
the homes of the Moors of the lower class are as 
much like stables as their stables are like pig- 
sties. The poor of Tangier are allowed, through 
the kindness of the Sultan, to sleep on the bare 
stones around the entrance to one of the mosques. 
For the poor sick there has been built a portico, 
about as large as a Fifth Avenue omnibus, oppo- 
site this same mosque. This is called the hospital 
of Tangier. It is considered quite good enough 
for sick people and for those who have no homes. 
And every night you will see bundles of rags lying 
in the open street or under the narrow roof of the 
portico, exposed to the rain and to the bitter cold. 
If this, in the minds of the Moors, is fair treatment 
of the sick and the poor, one cannot expect them 



70 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

to give their criminals and murderers white bread 
and a freshly rolled turban every morning. 

If I had seen horrible things in the Sultan's 
prison — men starving, or too sick to rise, or 
chained to the walls, or half mad, or loathsome 
with disease — I should certainly have been glad 
to call the attention of other people to it, not 
from any philanthropic motives perhaps, but as 
a matter of news interest. I did not, however, 
see any of these things. Dr. Field, I believe, was 
differently impressed, and is of the opinion that 
the outer corridor contained many things much 
too horrible to believe possible. He compared 
this to Dante's ninth circle of hell, and made a 
point of the fact that the guard had called me 
back when I walked towards it. I, however, went 
into it while the doctor and the guard were get- 
ting the door open for us to return, and saw 
nothing there but straw. It seemed to me to be 
the place where the men slept when the rain, 
coming through the opening in the roof, made it 
unpleasant for them to remain in the court. 

It may seem that my persistence in visiting the 
prison is inconsistent with what I have said of 
foreigners forcing themselves into places in Mo- 
rocco where they are not wanted, but I am quite 
sure that, had any one heard the stories told me 
of the horror of these jails, he would have con- 
sidered himself justified in learning the truth 
about them ; and I cannot understand why, if 
the members of the legations who tell these sto- 
ries believe them, they have not used their in- 



TANGIER 71 

fluence to try and better the condition of the 
prisoners, rather than to introduce game-laws 
for the protection of partridges and wild-boars. 
It is, perhaps, gratifying to note that the two 
gentlemen of whom I spoke as having visited 
the prison in the last ten years were the Ameri- 
can Consul-General and another resident Ameri- 
can.- Both of these contributed food to the pris- 
oners, and reported what they had seen to our 
government. 

On the whole, Tangier impresses one as a fine 
thing spoiled by civilization. Barbarism with 
electric lights at night is not attractive. Tangier 
to every traveller should be chiefly interesting as 
a stepping-stone towards Tetuan or Fez. Tetuan 
can be reached in a day's journey, and there the 
Moor is to be seen pure and simple, barbarous 
and beautiful. 



til 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 




HERE are certain places and things 
with which the EngHsh novel has made 
us so familiar that it is not necessary 
^S for us to go far afield or to study guide- 
books in order to feel that we have 
known them intimately and always. We know 
Paddington Station as the place where the de- 
tective interrogates the porter who handled the 
luggage of the escaping criminal, and as the spot 
from which the governess takes her ticket for the 
country-house where she is to be persecuted by 
its mistress and loved by all the masculine mem- 
bers of the household. We also know that a P. 
and O. steamer is a means of conveyance almost 
as generally used by heroes and heroines of Eng- 
lish fiction as a hansom cab. It is a vessel upon 
which the heroine meets her Fate, either in the 
person of a young man on his way home from 
India, or by being shipwrecked on a desert island 
on her way to Australia, and where the only 
other surviving passenger tattooes his will upon 
her back, leaves her all his fortune, and consider- 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 73 

ately dies. Long ago a line of steamers ran to 
the Peninsula of Spain ; later they shortened their 
sails, as the Romans shortened their swords, and, 
like the Romans, extended their boundaries to the 
Orient. This line is now an institution with tra- 
ditions and precedents and armorial bearings and 
time-hallowed jokes, and when you step upon the 
deck of a P. and O. steamer for the first time you 
feel that you are not merely an ordinary passen- 
ger, but a part of a novel in three volumes, or of 
a picture in the London GrapJiic^ and that all sorts 
of things are imminent and possible. It may not 
have occurred to you before embarking, but you 
know as soon as you come over the side that you 
expected to find the deck strewn with laces and 
fans and daggers from Tangier, and photographs 
of Gibraltar, and such other trifles for possible 
purchase by the outbound passengers, and that 
the crew would be little barefooted lascars in red 
turbans and long blue shirts, with a cumberband 
about their persons, and that you would be called 
to tiffin instead of to lunch. 

A fat little lascar balanced himself in the jolly- 
boat outlined against the sky and held aloft a red 
flag until the hawser swung clear of the propeller, 
when he raised a white flag above him and stood 
as motionless as the Statue of Liberty, while 
the Siitlej cleared Europa Point of Gibraltar and 
headed towards the East. Then he pattered 
across the deck and leaned over the side and 
crooned in a lazy, barbarous monotone to the 
waves. The sun fell upon the boat like a spell 



74 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

and turned us Into sleepy and indolent fixtures 
wherever it first found us, and showed us the 
white-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada of 
Spain to the north, and the dim blue mountains 
of Africa to the south. The deck below was 
scrubbed as white as a bread-board, and the masts 
and rigging threw black shadows on the awning 
overhead, and on every side the blue Mediterra- 
nean and the bluer Mediterranean sky met and 
sparkled and reflected each other's brilliancy like 
mirrors placed face to face. 

For four days the sun greeted the Sutlej by 
day and the moon by night, and the coast of 
Africa played hide-and-seek along her starboard 
side, disappearing in a white mist of cloud for an 
hour or so, and then running along with us again 
in comfortable proximity. On the other side 
boats passed at almost as frequent intervals, and 
at such friendly range that one could count the 
people on the decks and read their flag signals 
without a glass. The loneliness of the North 
Atlantic, where an iceberg stands for land, and 
only an occasional tramp steamer rests the eye, is 
as different to this sea as a railroad journey over 
the prairie is to the jaunt from New York to 
Washington. On the second night out we see 
Algiers, glowing and sparkling in the night like a 
million of fire-flies, and with the clear steady eye 
of the light -house warning us away, as though 
the quarantine had not warned some of us away 
already. And on the third night we pass Cape 
Bon, and can Imagine Tunis lying tantalizingly 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 



7S 



near us, behind its light-house, shut off also by 
the quarantine that the cholera at Marseilles has 
made imperative wherever the French line of 
steamers touch. By this time the twoscore pas- 
sengers have foregathered as they would never 
have done had they all been Americans, or had 




J 



MALTESE PEDDLERS 



there been three hundred of them, and their place 
of meeting the deck of a transatlantic steamer 
instead of one of this picturesque fleet, upon 
which you expect strange things to happen. 
When an American goes to sea, he reads books, 



76 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

or he calculates the number of tons of coal it is 
taking to run the vessel at that rate of speed, and 
he determines that rate of speed by counting the 
rise and fall of the piston-rod, with his watch in 
his hand ; and when this ceases to amuse him he 
plays cards in the smoking-room or holds pools 
on the run and on the pilot's number. The 
Englishman joins in these latter amusements, be- 
cause nothing better offers. But when his foot 
is on his native heath or on the deck of one of 
his own vessels, he demonstrates his preference 
for that sort of entertainment which requires 
exercise and little thought. If it is at a country- 
house, he plays games which entail considerable 
running about, and at picnics he enjoys ''Throw 
the handkerchief," and on board ship he plays 
cricket and other games dear to the heart of the 
American at the age of five. This is partly be- 
cause he always exercises and likes moving about, 
as Americans do not, and because the reading of 
books (except such books as Mr. Potter of Texas, 
which, I firmly believe, every Englishman I ever 
met has read, and upon which they have bestowed 
the most unqualified approval as the truest picture 
of American life and character they have ever 
found) entertains him for but a very short period 
at a time. 

So a netting is placed about the upper deck 
for him, and he plays cricket ; not only he, but 
his wife and his sister and his mother and the 
unattached young ladies under the captain's care, 
who are going out to India, presumably to be met 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 



11 



at the wharf by prospective husbands. There is 
something most charming in the absolute equahty 
which this sport entails, and the seriousness with 
which the English regard it. We could not in 
America expect a white-haired lady with specta- 
cles to bowl overhand, or to see that it is consid- 
ered quite as a matter of course that she should 
do it by the member of the last Oxford eleven, 
nor would our young women be able to hold a 
hot ball, or to take it with the hands crossed and 
only partly open, and not palm to palm and wide 
apart. An American, as a rule, walks in order 
that he may reach a certain point, but the Eng- 
lishman walks for the sake of the walking. And 
he plays games, also, apparently for the exercise 
there is in them ; games in which people sit in a 
circle and discuss whether love or reason should 
guide them in going into matrimony do not ap- 
peal to him so strongly as do '' Oranges and lem- 
ons," or "Where are you, Jacob?" which is a very 
fine game, in which an early training in sliding to 
bases gives you a certain advantage. It is cer- 
tainly instructive to hear a captain who got his 
company through storming Fort Nilt last year in 
the Pamir inquire, anxiously, " Oranges or lem- 
ons ? Yes, I know. But zvJiich should I say, old 
chap ? I'm a little rusty in the game, you know." 
If people can get back to the days when they 
were children by playing games, or in any other 
way, no one can blame them. 

The island of Gozo rose up out of the sea on 
the fourth day — a yellow rib of rock on the 



78 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

right, with houses and temples on it — and de- 
monstrated how few days of water are necessary 
to rob one's memory of the usual look of a 
house. One would imagine by the general in- 
terest in them that we had spent the last few 
years of our lives in tents, or in the arctic re- 
gions under huts of snow and ice. And then 
the ship heads in towards Malta, and instead 
of dropping anchor and waiting for a tender, 
glides calmly into what is apparently its chief 
thoroughfare. It is like a Venice of the sea, and 
you feel as though you were intruding in a gen-, 
tleman's front yard. The houses and battlements 
and ramparts lie close on either side, so near that 
one could toss a biscuit into the hands of the 
Tommies smoking on the guns, or the natives 
lounging on the steps that run from the front 
doors into the sea itself. The yard-arms reach 
above the line of the house-tops, and the bow- 
sprit seems to threaten havoc with the window- 
panes of the custom-house. We are not appar- 
ently entering a harbor, but steaming down the 
main street of a city — a city of yellow limestone, 
with streets, walls, houses, and waste places all of 
yellow limestone. We might, for all the disturb- 
ance we are making, be moving forward in a bark 
canoe, and not in an ocean steamer drawing 
twenty-five feet of water. And then when the 
anchor drops, dozens of little boats, yellow and 
green and blue, with high posts at the bow and 
sterns like those on gondolas, shoot out from the 
steps, and their owners clamor for the proud 




STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 8 1 

privilege of carrying us over the few feet of water 
which runs between the line of houses and the 
ship's sides. 

There was at the Centennial Exposition the 
head of a woman cut in butter, which attracted 
much attention from the rural visitors. For this 
they passed by the women painted on canvas 
or carved in marble, they were too like the real 
thing, and the countrymen probably knew how 
difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For 
some reason Malta reminds you of this butter 
lady. It is a real city — with real houses and ca- 
thedral and streets, no doubt, but you have a feel- 
ing that they are not genuine, and that though it 
is very cleverly done, it is, after all, a city carved 
out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is 
mouldy and covered with green, and some of the 
walls have holes in them, as has aerated bread 
or Sc/nveitzerkasc, and the streets and the pave- 
ments, and the carved facades of the church- 
es and opera-house, and the earth and the hills 
beyond — everything upon which your eye can 
rest is glaring and yellow, with not a red roof to 
relieve it ; it is all just yellow limestone, and it 
looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other 
place exactly that you have ever seen. The ap- 
proach into the canal-like harbor under the guns 
and the search -lights of the fortifications, the 
moats and drawbridges, and the glaring monot- 
ony of the place itself, which seems to have 
been cut out of one piece and painted with one 
brush, suggest those little toy fortresses of yel- 



82 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

low wood which appear in the shop windows at 
Christmas-time. 

Of course the first and last thought one has 
of Malta is that the island was the home of the 
Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights 
Hospitallers. This order, which was the most 
noble of those of the days of mediaeval chivalry, 
was composed of that band of warrior monks 
who waged war against the infidels, who kept 
certain vows, and who, under the banner of 
the white cross, became honored and feared 
throughout the then known world. Their head- 
quarters changed from place to place during the 
four hundred years that stretched from the 
eleventh century, when the order was first es- 
tablished, up to 1530, when Charles V. made 
over Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual 
sovereignty to the keeping of these Knights. 
They had no sooner fortified the island than 
there began the nine months' siege of the Turks, 
one of the most memorable sieges in history. 
When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten 
thousand of the forty thousand men they had 
landed, and of the nine thousand Knights pres- 
ent under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette 
when the siege had opened, but six hundred ca- 
pable of bearing arms remained alive. 

The order continued in possession of their 
island until the beginning of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, when the French, under General Bonaparte, 
took it with but little trouble. The French in 
turn were besieged by Maltese and English, and 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 83 

after two years capitulated. In 1814 the island 
was transferred to England. It now, in its 
monuments and its memories, speaks of the days 
of chivalry ; but present and mixed with these is 
the ubiquitous red coat of the British soldier ; 
and the eight-pointed Maltese cross, which sug- 
gests Ivanhoe, is placed side by side with the 
lion and the unicorn ; the culverin has given 
way to the quick-throbbing Maxim gun, the Tem- 
plar's sword to the Lee-Metford rifle, and the he- 
roes of Walter Scott to the friends of Mr. Rud- 
yard Kipling. 

The most conspicuous relic of the French oc- 
cupation is not a noble one. It is the penitential 
hood of the Maltese woman — a strangely pictu- 
resque article of apparel, like a cowl or Shaker 
bonnet, only much larger than the latter, and with 
a cape which hangs over the shoulders. The 
women hold the two projecting flaps of the hood 
together at the throat, and unless you are advanc- 
ing directly towards them, their faces are quite 
invisible. The hoods and capes are black, and 
are worn as a penance for the frailty of the wom- 
en of Malta when the French took the place and 
robbed the churches, and pillaged the storehouses 
of the Knights, and bore themselves with less 
restraint than the infidel Turks had done. 

Malta retains a slight suggestion of mediaeval- 
ism in the garb of the Capuchin monks, whose 
tonsured heads and bare feet and roped waists 
look like a masquerade in their close proximity to 
the young officers in tweeds and varnished boots. ' 



84 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

But one gets the best idea of the past from the 
great Church of St. John, which is full of the tro- 
phies and gifts of the Grand Masters of the Order, 
and floored with two thousand marble tombs of 
the Knights themselves. Each Grand Master 
vied with those who had preceded him in enrich- 
ing this church, and each Knight on his promo- 
tion made it a gift, so that to-day it is rich in 
these and wonderfully beautiful. This is the 
chief show-place, and the Governor's palace is an- 
other, and, to descend from the sublimity of the 
past to the absurdity of the present, so is also 
the guard-room of the officer of the day, which 
generations of English subalterns have helped to 
decorate. Each year a committee of officers go 
over the pictures on its walls and rub out the 
least amusing, and this survival of the fittest has 
resulted in a most entertaining gallery of black 
and white. 

The Order of Jerusalem, or of St. John, still 
obtains in Europe, and those who can show four- 
teen quarterings on one side and twelve on the 
other are entitled to belong to it; but they are 
carpet knights, and wearing an enamel Maltese 
cross on the left side of an evening coat is a dif- 
ferent thing from carrying it on a shield for Sar- 
acens to hack at. 

Sicily showed itself for a few hours while the 
boat continued on its way to Brindisi ; and as 
that day happened to be the 4th of March, the 
captain of the Stttlej was asked to make a calcu- 
lation for which there will be no further need for 



i'^ 






FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 87 

four years to come. This calculation showed at 
what point in the Mediterranean ocean the Stit- 
lej would be when a President was being inaugu- 
rated in Washington, and at the proper time the 
passengers were invited to the cabin, and the fact 
that a government was changing into the hands 
of one who could best take care of it was im- 
pressed upon them in different ways. And later, 
after dinner, the captain of the Siitlej made a 
speech, and said things about the important 
event (which he insisted on calling an election) 
which was then taking place in America, and the 
English cheered and drank the new President's 
health, and the two Americans on board, who 
fortunately were both good Democrats, felt not 
so far from home as before. 

You must touch at Brindisi, which Is situated 
on the heel of the boot of Italy, if you wish to go 
a part of the way by land from the East to Lon- 
don or from London to the East. And as many 
people prefer travelling forty-eight hours across 
the Continent to rounding Gibraltar, one hears 
often of Brindisi, and pictures it as a shipping 
port of the importance of Liverpool or Marseilles. 
Instead of which it is as desolate as a summer 
resort in midwinter, and is like that throughout 
the year. There was a long, broad stone wharf, 
and tall stucco houses behind, and banks of coal 
which suggested the rear approach to Long Isl- 
and City, and the soft blue Italian skies of which 
we had read were steely blue, and most of us 
wore overcoats. We lay bound fast to the whart, 



88 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

with a plank thrown from the boat's side to the 
quay, for the day, and we had free permission to 
learn to walk on streets again for full twenty-four 
hours ; but after facing the wind, and dodging 
guides who had nothing to show, we came back 
by preference to the clean deck and the stearn^r-, 
chair. Desperate -looking Italian soldiers \^i:h 
feathers in their hats, and custom-house officirs' 
and gendarmes paraded up and down the quay 
for our delectation, and a wicked little boy stood 
on the pier- head and sang *' Ta-ra-ra-boom-chi- 
ay," pointedly varying this knowledge of our sev- 
eral nationalities by crying : " I saj/, buy box 
matches. Get out." This show of learning 
caused him to be regarded by his fellows with 
much envy, and they watched us to see how far 
we were impressed. 

There are two things which need no newspaper 
advertising and which recognize no geographical 
lines ; one is a pretty face and the other is a good 
song. I have seen photographs for sale of Isa- 
belle Irving and Lillian Russell in as different lo- 
calities as Santiago in Cuba, and Rotterdam, and 
I saw a play -bill in San Antonio, Texas, upon 
which the Countess Dudley and the Duchess of 
Leinster were reproduced under the names of the 
Walsh Sisters. A good song will travel as far, 
changing its name, too, perhaps, and its words, 
but keeping the same melody that has pleased 
people in a different part of the world. When 
the moon came out at Brindisi and hid the heaps 
of coal, and showed only the white houses and 






riLLAR OF C.^LSAR AT BRINDISI 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 9 1 

the pillar of Caesar, a party of young men with 
guitars and mandolins gathered under the bow 
and sang a song called " Oh, Caroline," which I 
had last heard Francis Wilson sing as a part of 
the score of " The Lion-tamer," to very different 
words. As the scene of "The Lion-tamer" is 
laid in Sicily, the song was more or less in place; 
but the contrast between the dark-browed Italian 
and Mr. Wilson's genial countenance which the 
song brought back was striking. And on the 
night after we had left Brindisi, when the crew 
gave a concert, one of them sang " Oh, promise 
me," and some one asked if the song had yet 
reached America. I did not undeceive him, but 
said it had. 

After Brindisi the hands of the clock go back 
a few thousand years, and we see Cethdonia, 
where Ulysses owned much property, and Crete, 
from whence St. Paul set sail, with its long range 
of mountains covered with snow, and then we 
come back to the present near the island of 
Zante, where the earthquake moved a month ago 
and swallowed up the homes of the people. 

The Siitlej had been going out of her course 
all of the fourth day in order to dodge possible 
islands thrown up by the earthquake, and she 
was late. That night, as she steamed forward at 
her best speed, the level oily sea fell back from 
her bows with a steady ripple as she cut it in two 
and turned it back out of the way. A light on 
the horizon, like a policeman's lantern, which 
changed to the burnt -out end of a match and 



92 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

back again to a bulFs-eye, told us that beyond 
the light lay the level sands of Egypt, almost as 
far-reaching and monotonous as the sea that 
touched its shore. 

The force of habit is very strong on many peo- 
ple, and if they approach the land of the Pha- 
raohs and of Cleopatra an hour after their usual 
bedtime, they feel no inclination to diverge from 
their usual habits on that account. When you 
consider how many hours there are for slumber, 
and how many are given to dances, you would 
think one hour of sleep might be spared out of a 
lifetime in order that you could see Port Said at 
night. There was a long line of lamps on the 
shore, like a gigantic row of footlights or a prai- 
rie fire along the horizon, and we passed towards 
this through buoys with red and green lights, 
with a long sea-wall reaching out on one side, 
and the natural reef of jagged rocks rising black 
out of the sea in the path of the moon on the 
other. Then black boats shot out from the shore 
and assailed us with strange cries, and men in 
turbans and long robes, and negroes in what 
looked like sacking, and which probably was sack- 
ing, but which could not hide the suppleness and 
strength of their limbs, climbed up over the high 
sides. These were the coal-trimmers making way 
for the black islands, filled with black coal and 
blacker men, who made fast to the side and be- 
gan feeding the vessel through a blazing hole like 
an open fireplace in her iron side. Four braziers 
filled with soft coal burnt with a fierce red flame 




APPROACH TO ISMAILIA BY THE SUEZ CANAL 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 95 

from the corners of the barges, and in this light 
from out of the depths half- naked negroes ran 
shrieking and crying with baskets of coal on their 
shoulders to the top of an inclined plank, and 
stood there for a second in the full glare of the 
opening until one could see the whites of their 
eyes and the sweat glistening on the black faces. 
Then they pitched the coal forward into the 
lighted opening, as though they were feeding a 
fire, and disappeared with a jump downward into 
the pit of blackness. The coal dust rose in great 
curtains of mist, through which the figures of the 
men and the red light showed dimly and with 
wavering outline, like shadows in an iron -mill, 
and through it all came their cries and shouts, 
and the roar of the coal blocks as they rattled 
down into the hold. 

Port Said occupies the same position to the 
waters of the world as Dodge City once did to the 
Western States of America — it is the meeting- 
place of vessels from every land over every water, 
just as Dodge City was the meeting-place of the 
great trails across the prairies. When a cowboy 
reached Dodge City after six months of constant 
riding by day and of sleeping under the stars by 
night, and with wild steers for company, he want- 
ed wickedness in its worst form — such being the 
perversity of man. And you are told that Port 
Said offers to travellers and crew the same attrac- 
tive features after a month or weeks of rough 
voyaging that Dodge City once offered to the 
trailsmen. In The Light that Failed we are told 



96 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

that Port Said is the wickedest place on earth, 
that it is a sink of iniquity and" a hole of vice, and 
a wild night in Port Said is described there with 
pitiless detail. Almost every young man who 
leaves home for the East is instructed by his 
friends to reproduce that night, or never return to 
civilization. And every sea-captain or traveller 
or ex -member of the Army of Occupation in 
Egypt that I met on this visit to the East either 
smiled darkly when he spoke of Port Said or raised 
his eyes in horror. They all agreed on two things 
— that it was the home of the most beautiful wom- 
an on earth, which is saying a good deal, and that 
it was the wickedest, wildest, and most vicious 
place that man had created and God forgotten. 
One would naturally buy pocket-knives at Shef- 
field, and ginger ale in Belfast, and would not lay 
in a stock of cigars if going to Havana ; and so 
when guides in Continental cities and in the East 
have invited me to see and to buy strange things 
which caused me to doubt the morals of those 
who had gone before, I have always put them 
off, because I knew that some day I should visit 
Port Said. I did not want second-best and imi- 
tation wickedness, but the most awful wickedness 
of the entire world sounded as though it might 
prove most amusing. I expected a place blazing 
with lights, and with gambling-houses and cafes 
chantants open to the air, and sailors fighting 
with bare knives, and guides who cheated and 
robbed you, or led you to dives where you could 
be drugged and robbed by others. 



o 

w 
d 
o 
w 

> 
o 

?1 



w 

en 

C 

w 

N 

n 
> 
•z 

> 




FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO 99 

So I went on shore and gathered the guides 
together, and told them for the time being to 
sink their rivahy and to join with loyal local 
pride in showing me the worst Port Said could 
do. They consulted for some time, and then 
said that they were sorry, but the only gambling- 
house in the place closed at twelve, and so did 
the ov\y cafe cha7itant ; and as it was now nearly 
half-past twelve, every one was properly in bed. 
I expressed myself fully, and they were hurt, and 
said that Egypt was a great country, and that 
after I had seen Cairo I would say so. So I told 
them I had not meant to offend their pride of 
country, and that I was going to Cairo in order 
to see things almost as old as wickedness, and 
much more worth while, and that all I asked of 
Port Said was that it should live up to its name. 
I told them to hire a house, and wake the people 
in Port Said up, and show me the very worst, 
lowest, wickedest, and most vicious sights of 
which their city boasted ; that I would give them 
four hours in which to do it, and what money 
they needed. I should like to print what, after 
long consultation, the five guides of Port Said — 
which is a place a half-mile across, and with which 
they were naturally acquainted — offered me as 
the acme of riotous dissipation. I do not do so, 
not because it would bring the blush to the cheek 
of the reader,'but to the inhabitants of Port Said, 
who have enjoyed a notoriety they do not de- 
serve, and who are like those desperadoes in the 
West who would rather be considered '' bad " 



lOO THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

than the nonentities that they are. I bought pho- 
tographs, a box of cigarettes, and a cup of black 
coffee at Port Said. That cannot be considered 
a night of wild dissipation. Port Said may have 
been a sink of iniquity when Mr. Kipling was 
last there, but when I visited it it was a coaling 
station. I would hate to be called a coaling 
station if I were Port Said, even by me. 

When I awoke after my night of riot at Port 
Said the Siitlej was steaming slowly down the 
Suez Canal, and its waters rippled against its 
sandy banks and sent up strange odors of fish 
and mud. On either side stretched long levels 
of yellow sand dotted with bunches of dark green 
grass, like tufts on a quilt, over which stalked an 
occasional camel, bending and rocking, and scorn- 
ing the rival ship at its side. You have heard so 
much of the Suez Canal as an engineering feat 
that you rather expect, in your ignorance, to find 
the banks upheld by walls of masonry, and to 
pass through intricate locks from one level to an- 
other, or at least to see a well-beaten towpath at 
its side. But with the exception of dikes here 
and there, you pass between slipping sandy banks, 
which show less of the hand of m.an than does a 
mill-dam at home, and you begin to think that 
Ferdinand de Lesseps drew his walking-stick 
through the sand from the Red Sea to the Medi- 
terranean, and twenty thousand negroes followed 
him and dug a dit^h. On either side of this ditch 
you see reproduced in real life the big colored 
prints which hung on the walls of the Sunday- 



FROM GIBRALTAR TO CAIRO lOI 

school. There are the buffaloes drawing the 
ploughs of wood, and the wells of raw sun-baked 
clay, and the ditches and water -works of two 
cog-wheels and clay pots for irrigating the land, 
and the strings of camels, and the veiled women 
carrying earthen jars on the left shoulder. And 
beyond these stretches the yellow sand, not white 
and heavy, like our own, but dun - colored and 
fine, like dust, and over it amethyst skies bare of 
clouds, and tall palms. And then the boat stops 
again at Ismailia to let you off for Cairo, and the 
brave captains returning from leave, and the 
braver young women who are going out to work 
in hospitals, and the young wives with babies 
whom their fathers have not seen, and the com- 
missioners returning to rule and bully a native 
prince, pass on to India, and you are assaulted 
by donkey- boys who want you to ride "Mark 
Twain," or "Lady Dunlo," or " Two-Pair-of- 
Black - Eyes - Oh -What - a - Surprise - Grand - Ole- 
Man." A jerky, rumbling train carries you from 
Ismailia past Tel-el-Kebir station, where the 
British army surprised the enemy by a night 
march and took a train back to Cairo in three 
hours. And then, after a five hours* ride, you 
stop at Cairo, and this chapter ends. 



^ 



IV 



CAIRO AS A SHOW- PLACE 




^S a rule, when you visit the capital of 
a country for the first time it is suf- 
ficient that you should have studied 
the history of that particular coun- 
try in order that you may properly 
appreciate the monuments and the show-places 
of its chief cities ; it is not. necessary that you 
should be an authority on the history of Norway 
and Sweden to understand Paris or New York. 
For a full appreciation of most of the great cities 
of the world one finds a single red-bound volume 
of Baedeker to be all-sufficient; but when you go 
to Cairo, in order that you may understand all 
that lies spread out for your pleasure, you should 
first have mastered the Old and the New Testa- 
ment, a complete history of the world, several of 
Shakespeare's plays, and the files of the London 
Times for the past ten years. Almost every 
man who was great, not only in the annals of his 
own country, but in the history of the world, has 
left his mark on this oldest country of Egypt, as 
tourists to the Colosseum have scratched their 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 1 03 

initials on its stones, and so hope for immortality. 
You are shown in Cairo the monuments of great 
monarchs and of a great people, who were not 
known beyond the limits of their own country in 
contemporaneous history only because there was 
no contemporaneous history, and of those who 
came thousands of years later. The isle of Rod- 
da, between the two banks of the Nile at Cairo, 
marks where Moses was found in the bulrushes ; 
a church covers the stones upon which Mary and 
Joseph rested ; in the city of Alexandria is the 
spot where Alexander the Great scratched liis 
name upon the sands of Egypt ; the mouldering 
walls of Old Cairo are the souvenirs of Caesar, as 
are the monuments upon which the Egyptians 
carved his name with "Autocrator" after it. At 
Actium and Alexandria you think of Antony 
and of the two women, so widely opposed and 
so differently beautiful, whom Sarah Bernhardt 
and Julia Neilson re-embody to-day in Paris and 
in London, and to whom Shakespeare and Kings- 
ley have paid tribute. Mansoorah marks the 
capture of Saint-Louis of France, and the cres- 
cent and star which is floating over Cairo at this 
minute speak of Osman Sultan Selim L, with 
whom began the dependence of Egypt as a part 
of the Ottoman Empire. From there you see 
the windmills and bake-ovens of Napoleon, which 
latter, stretching for miles across the desert, mark 
the march of his army. Abukir speaks of Nel- 
son and the battle of the Nile ; and after him 
come the less momentous names Tel-cl-Kebir 



104 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

and " England's Only General," Wolseley, and 
the fall of Khartoom and the loss of Gordon. 
The history of Egypt is the history of the Old 
World. 

Moses, Rameses IL, Darius, Alexander, Caesar, 
Napoleon, Mehemet Ali, and Nelson — these are 
all good names ; and yet what they failed to do 
is apparently being done to-day by an Army of 
Occupation without force, but with the show of 
it only : not by a single great military hero, but 
by a lot of men in tweed suits who during busi- 
ness hours irrigate land and add up columns of 
irritating figures, and in their leisure moments 
solemnly play golf at the very base of the pyra- 
mids. The best of Cairo lies, of course, in that 
which is old, and not in what has been imported 
from the New World, and its most amusing feat- 
ures are the incongruities which these importa- 
tions make possible. I am speaking of Cairo now 
from a tourist's point of view, and not from that 
of a political economist. He would probably be 
interested in the improved sanitation and the 
Mixed Tribunal. 

I had pictured Cairo as an Oriental city of 
much color, with beautiful minarets piercing the 
sky-line, and with much richness of decoration 
on the outside of its palaces and mosques. Cairo 
is divided into two parts, that which is old and 
decaying and that which is European and modern; 
the prevailing colors of both are gray, a dull 
yellow, and white. The mosques are of gray 
stone, the houses of dirty white, and in the new 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 



105 



part the palaces and residences remind one of 
white Italian villas. These are surrounded by 
tropical gardens, which alone save the city from 
one monotonous variation of sombre colors. It 
is not, therefore, the buildings, either new or 




BAZAR OF A WORKER IN BRASS 



old, which make Cairo one of the most pictu- 
resque and incongruous and entertaining of cities 
in the whole world ; it is the people who live in 
it and who move about in it, and who are so 



Io6 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

constantly in the streets that from the Citadel 
above the city its roar comes to you like the roar 
of London. In that city it is the voice of traf- 
fic and steam and manufactures, but in Cairo it 
emanates from the people themselves, who talk 
and pray and shout and live their lives out-of- 
doors. These people are the natives, the Euro- 
pean residents, the Army of Occupation, and, 
during the winter months, the tourists. When 
you say natives you include Egyptians, Arabians, 
Copts, Syrians, negroes from the Upper Nile, 
and about a hundred other subdivisions, which 
embrace every known nationality of the East. 

Mixed with these are the residents, chiefly 
Greek and French and Turks, and the Army of 
Occupation, who, when they are not in beautiful 
uniforms, are in effective riding-clothes, and their 
wives and sisters in men's shirts and straw hats 
or Karkee riding-habits. The tourists, for their 
part, wear detective cameras and ready-made ties 
if they are Americans, and white helmets and 
pugarees floating over their necks and white um- 
brellas if they are English. This latter tropical 
outfit is spoiled somewhat by the fact that they 
are forced to wear overcoats the greater part of 
the time ; but as they always take the overcoats 
off when they are being photographed at the 
base of the pyramids, their envious friends at 
home imagine they are in a warm climate. 

The longer you remain in Cairo the more sat- 
isfying it becomes, as you find how uninterrupt- 
edly the old, old life of the people is going on 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 1 07 

about you, and as you discover for yourself bazars 
and mosques and tiny workshops and open cafes of 
which the guide-books say nothing, and to which 
there are no guides. You can see all the show- 
places in Cairo of which you have read in a week, 
and yet at the end of the week you feel as though 
what you had seen was not really the city, but just 
the goods in the shop-window. So keep away 
from show-places. Lose yourself in the streets, 
or sit idly on the terrace of your hotel and watch 
the show move by, feeling that the best of it, 
after all, lies in the fact that nothing you see is 
done for show; that it is all natural to the people 
or the place ; that if they make pictures of them- 
selves, they do so unconsciously ; and that no 
one is posing except the tourist in his pith hel- 
met. 

The bazars in Cairo cover much ground, and 
run in cliques according to the nature of the 
goods they expose for sale. From a narrow 
avenue of red and yellow leath'er shoes you come 
to another lane of rugs and curtains and cloth, 
and through this to an alley of brass — brass 
lamps and brass pots and brass table-tops — and 
so on into groups of bookbinders, and of armor- 
ers, and sellers of perfumes. These lanes are 
unpaved, and only wide enough at places for 
two men to push past at one time ; at the widest 
an open carriage can just make its way slowly, 
and only at the risk of the driver's falling off his 
box in a paroxysm of rage. The houses and 
shops that overhang these filthy streets are as 



Io8 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

primitive and old as the mud in which you tramp, 
but they are fantastically and unceasingly beau- 
tiful. On the level of the street is the bazar — a 
little box with a show-case at one side, and at 
the back an oven, or a forge, or a loom, accord- 
ing to the nature of the thing which is being 
made before your eyes. Goldsmiths beat and 
blow on the raw metal as you stand at their 
elbow ; bakers knead their bread ; laundrymen 
squirt water over the soiled linen ; armorers ham- 
mer on a spear-head, which is afterwards to be 
dug up and sold as an assegai from the Soudan; 
and the bookbinders to the Khedive paste and 
tool the leather boxes for his Highness with the 
dust from the street covering them and their 
work, with two dogs fighting for garbage at their 
feet, and the uproar of thousands of people ring- 
ing in their ears. The Oriental cannot express 
himself in the street without shouting. Every- 
body shouts — donkey-boys and drivers, venders 
of a hundred trifles, police and storekeepers, auc- 
tioneers and beggars. They do not shout oc- 
casionally, but continually. They have to shout, 
or they will either trample on some one or some 
one will as certainly trample on them. Camels 
and donkeys and open carriages and mounted 
police move through the torrent of pedestrians 
as though they were figures of the imagination, 
and had no feelings or feet. On the second story 
over each bazar is the home of its owner. The 
windows of this story are latticed, and bulge for- 
ward so that the women of the harem may look 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE III 

down without being themselves seen. Above 
these are square, heavy balconies of carved open 
wood-work, very old and very beautiful. Scat- 
tered through the labyrinth of the bazars are the 
mosques, with wide, dirty steps covered with the 
red and yellow shoes of the worshippers within, 
and with high minarets, and fagades carved in 
relief with sentences from the Koran, or with 
the name of the Sultan to whom the temple is 
dedicated. 

The bazars are very much as one imagines they 
should be, the fact that impresses you most 
about them being, I think, that such beautiful 
things should come from such queer little holes 
of dirt and poverty, and that you should stand 
ankle -deep in mud while you are handling tur- 
quoises and gold filigree-work as delicate as that 
of Regent Street or Broadway. At the bazars 
to which the dragomen take tourists you will be 
invited to sit down on a cushion and to drink 
coffee and smoke cigarettes, but you will pay, if 
you purchase anything, about a pound for each 
cup of coffee you take. The best bazars for bar- 
gains are those in Old Cairo, to which you should 
go alone. In either place it is the rule to offer 
one-third of what you are asked — as I found it 
was not the rule to do in Tangier — and it is not 
always safe to offer a third unless you want the 
article very much, as you will certainly get it at 
that price. You feel much more at home in the 
bazars and the cafes and in all of the out-of-door 
life of Cairo than in that of Tangier, owing to 



112 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

the good -nature of the Egyptian. The Moor 
resents your presence, and though that in itself 
is attractive, the absolute courtesy of the Egyp- 
tian, when it is not, as it seldom is, servility, has 
also its advantage. If you raised your stick to 
a Moorish donkey-boy, for instance, you would 
undoubtedly have as much rough-and-tumble 
fighting as you could attend to at one time ; 
but you have to beat an Egyptian donkey-boy, or 
strike at him, or a dozen of him, if you want 
peace, and every time you hit him he comes up 
smiling, and with renewed assurances that the 
Flying Dutchman is a very good donkey, and 
that all the other donkeys are " velly sick." 
There is nothing so inspiring as the sight of a 
carefully bred American girl, who would feel 
remorse if she scolded her maid, beating eight or 
nine donkey- boys with her umbrella, until she 
breaks it, and so rides off breathless but tri- 
umphant. This shows that necessity knows no 
laws of social behavior. 

When you are weary of fighting your way 
through the noise and movement of the bazars, 
you can find equal entertainment on the terrace 
of your hotel. There are several hotels in Cairo. 
There is one to which you should certainly go if 
you like to see your name encompassed by those 
of countesses and princes, and of Americans 
who spell Smith with a " y " and put a hyphen 
between their second and third names. There 
are, as I say, a great many hotels in Cairo, but 
Shepheard's is so historical, and its terrace has 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE II3 

been made the scene of so many novels, that all 
sorts of amusing people go there, from Sultans 
to the last man who broke the bank at Monte 
Carlo, and its terrace is like a private box at a 
mask ball. About the best way to see Cairo is 
in a wicker chair here under waving palms, some- 
thing to smoke, and with a warm sun on your 
back, and the whole world passing by in front of 
you. Broadway, I have no doubt, is an interest- 
ing thoroughfare to those who do not know it. 
I should judge from the view one has of the soles 
of numerous boots planted against the windows 
of hotels along its course that Broadway to the 
visiting stranger is an infinite source of entertain- 
ment. But there are no camels on Broadway, 
and there are no sais. 

A camel by itself is one of the most interesting 
animals that has ever been created, but when 
it blocks the way of a dog -cart, and a smart 
English groom endeavors to drive around it, the 
incongruity of the situation appeals to you as 
nothing on Broadway can ever do. Mr. Laurence 
Hutton, who was in Cairo before I reached it, 
has pointed out that the camel is the real aristo- 
crat of Egypt. The camel belongs to one of the 
very first families ; he was there when Mena 
ruled, and he is there now. It does not matter 
to him whether it is a Pharaoh or a Mameluke or 
a Napoleon or a Mixed Tribunal that is in power, 
his gods are unchanged, and he and the palm- 
tree have preserved their ancient individuality 
through centuries. He shows that he knows this 
8 



114 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

in the proud way in which he holds his head, and 
in his disdainful manner of waving and unwind- 
ing his neck, and in the rudeness with which he 
impedes traffic and selfishly considers his own 
comfort. These are the signs of ancient lineage 
all the world over. He is not the shaggy, moth- 
eaten object we see in the circus tent at home. 
He is nicely shaven, like a French poodle, and 
covered with fine trappings, and he bends and 
struts with the dignity of a peacock. He posses- 
ses also that uncertainty of conduct that is the 
privilege of a royal mind; fellahin and Arabs 
pretend they are his masters, and lead him about 
with a rope, but that never disturbs him nor 
breaks his spirit. When he wants to lie down 
he lies down, whether he is in the desert or in 
the Ezbekiyeh Road ; and when he decides to 
get up he leaves you in doubt for some feverish 
seconds as to which part of him will get up first. 
To properly appreciate the camel you should 
ride him and experience his getting up and his 
sitting down. He never does either of these 
things the same way twice. Sometimes he breaks 
one leg in two or three places where it had never 
broken before, and sinks or rises in a north- 
easterly direction, and then suddenly changes 
his course and lurches up from the rear, and you 
grasp his neck wildly, only to find that he is sink- 
ing rapidly to one side, and rising, with a jump 
equal to that of a horse taking a fence, in the 
front. He can disjoint himself in more different 
places than explorers have found sources for the 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 1 15 

river Nile, and there is no keener pleasure than 
that which he affords you in watching the coun- 
tenance of a friend who is being elevated on his 
back for the first time. He and the palm-tree 
can make any landscape striking, and he and the 
sais are the most picturesque features of Cairo. 

The sais is a runner who keeps in front of a 
carriage and warns common people out of the 
way, and who beats them with a stick if they do 
not hurry up about it. He is a relic of the days 
when the traffic in all of the streets was so con- 
gested that he was an absolute necessity ; now he 
makes it possible for a carriage to move forward 
at a trot, which without his aid it could not do. 
It is obvious that to do this he must run swiftly. 
Most men when they run bend their bodies for- 
ward and keep their mouths closed in order to 
save their wind. The sais runs with his shoulders 
thrown back and trumpeting like an enraged 
elephant. He holds his long wand at his side 
like a musket, and not trailing in his hand like a 
walking-stick, and he wears a soft shirt of white 
stuff, and a sleeveless coat buried in gold lace. 
His breeches are white, and as voluminous as a 
woman's skirts ; they fall to a few inches above 
his knee ; the rest of his brown leg is bare, and 
rigid with muscle. On his head he has a fez 
with a long black tassel, and a magnificent silk 
scarf of many colors is bound tightly around his 
waist. He is a perfect ideal of color and move- 
ment, and as he runs he bellows like a bull, or 
roars as you have heard a lion roar at feeding- 



Il6 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

time in a menagerie. It is not a human cry at 
all, and you never hear it, even to the last day 
of your stay in Cairo, without a start, as though 
it were a cry of " help !" at night, or the quick- 
clanging bell of a fire-engine. There is nothing 
else in Cairo which is so satisfying. There are 
sometimes two sais running abreast, dressed ex- 
actly alike, and with the upper part of their 
bodies as rigid as the wand pressed against their 
side, and with the ends of their scarf and the 
long tassel streaming out behind. As they yell 
and bellow, donkeys and carriages and people 
scramble out of their way until the carriage they 
precede has rolled rapidly by. Only princesses 
of the royal harem, and consuls-general, and the 
heads of the Army of Occupation and the Egyp- 
tian army are permitted two sais ; other people 
may have one. They appealed to me as much 
more autocratic appendages than a troop of life- 
guards. The rastaquouere who first introduces 
them in Paris will make his name known in a 
day, and a Lord Mayor's show or a box-seat on 
a four-in-hand will be a modest and middle-class 
distinction in comparison. 

These camels and sais are but two of the things 
you see from your wicker chair on the marble 
terrace at Shepheard's. The others are hundreds 
of donkey-boys in blue night-gowns slit open at 
the throat and showing their bare breasts, and 
with them as many long-eared donkeys, rendered 
even more absurd than they are in a state of 
nature by fantastic clippings of their coats and 



c: 
> 

w 
o 

u 




"'M 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE II9 

strings of jangling brass and blue beads around 
their necks. 

There are also the women of Cairo, the en- 
slaved half of Egypt, who have been brought, 
through generations of training and tradition, to 
look upon any man save their husband as their 
enemy, as a thing to be shunned. This has 
become instinct with them, as it is instinctive 
with women of Northern countries to turn to 
men for sympathy or support, as being in some 
ways stronger than themselves. But these wom- 
en of Cairo, who look like an army of nuns, are 
virtually shut off from mankind, with the excep- 
tion of one man, as are nuns, and they have not 
the one great consolation allowed the nun — they 
ha\% no souls to be saved, nor religion, nor a 
belief in a future life. 

There was a young girl married while I was in 
Cairo. The streets around the palace of her fa- 
ther were hung with flags for a week ; the garden 
about his house was enclosed with a tent which 
was worth in money twenty thousand dollars, 
and which was as beautiful to the eye as the in- 
terior of a mosque ; for a week the sheiks who 
rented the estates of the high contracting parties 
were fed at their expense ; for a week men sang 
and bands played and the whole neighborhood 
feasted ; and on the last night everybody went 
to the wedding and drank coffee and smoked ci- 
garettes and listened to a young man singing 
Arabian love-songs. I naturally did not see the 
bride. The women who did see her described 



I20 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

her as very beautiful, barely sixteen years old, 
and covered with pearls and diamonds. She was 
weeping bitterly ; her mother, it appeared, had 
arranged the match. I did not see her, but I 
saw the bridegroom. He was fat and stupid, 
and over sixty, and he had white hair and a 
white beard. A priest recited the Kqran before 
him at the door of the house, and a band played, 
and the people cheered the Khedive three times, 
and then the crowd parted, and the bridegroom 
was marched to the door which led to the stairs, 
at the top of which the girl awaited him. Two 
grinning eunuchs crouched on this dark staircase, 
with lamps held high above their heads, and 
closed the door behind him. His sixteen-year- 
old bride has him to herself now — him and his 
eunuchs — until he or she dies. We could show 
similitudes between this wedding and some others 
in civilized lands, but it is much too serious a 
matter to be cynical about. 

The women of Egypt are as much slaves as 
ever were the negroes of our South. They are 
petted and fattened and given a home, but they 
must look at life through barriers — barriers across 
their boxes at the opera, and barriers across the 
windows of their broughams when they drive 
abroad, and barriers across their very faces. As 
long as one-half of the Egyptian people are en- 
slaved and held in bondage and classed as an- 
imals without souls, so long will an Army of 
Occupation ride over the land, and insult by 
its presence the khedival power. No country 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 121 

in these days can be truly great in which the 
women have no voice, no influence, and no re- 
spect. There are worse things in Egypt than 
bad irrigation, and the harem is the worst of 
them. If the Egyptians want to be free them- 
selves, they should first free their daughters 
and their mothers. The educated Egyptian is 
ashamed of his national costume ; but let him 
feel shame for some of his national customs. A 
frock-coat and a harem will not go together. 

The English, who have done so many fine 
things for Egypt's good, and who keep an army 
there to emphasize the fact, have arranged that 
any slave who comes to the office of the Consul- 
General and claims his protection can have it ; 
but these slaves of the married men are not grant- 
ed even this chance of escape. 

And so they live like birds in a cage. They 
eat and dress and undress, and expose their youth 
and beauty, and hide their age and ugliness, until 
they die. The cry along the Nile a few years ago 
was, " Egypt for the Egyptians," and a very good 
cry it was, although the wrong man first started it. 
But there was another cry raised in the land of 
Egypt many hundreds of years before of " Let my 
people go," and the woman who can raise that 
again to-day, and who can set free her sisters of 
the East, will be doing a greater work than any 
woman is doing at the present time or has ever 
done. 

The women who pass before you in the pro- 
cession at the foot of the terrace are of two classes 



122 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

only. There is no middle class in Egypt. The 
poor are huddled up in a black bag that hides 
their bodies from the crown of the head to the 
feet. What looks like the upper end of a black 
silk stocking falls over the face from the bridge 
of the nose and fastens behind the ears, and a 
brass tube about the size of a spool is tied be- 
tween the eyes. You see in consequence nothing 
but their eyes, and as these are perhaps their best 
feature, they do not all suffer from their enforced 
disguise. The only women whose bare faces you 
can see, and from whom you may judge of the 
beauty of the rest, are the good women of the 
Coptic village, who form a sort of sisterhood, and 
the dancing- girls, who are not so good. Some 
of these have the straight nose, the narrow eyes, 
and the perfect figure of Cleopatra, as we picture 
her; but the faces of the majority are formless, 
with broad, fat noses, full lips, and their figures 
are without waists or hips, and their ankles are 
as round as a man's upper arm. When they are 
pretty they are very pretty, but those that are 
so are so few and are so covered with gold that 
one suspects they are very much the exception. 
Of the women of the upper class you see only a 
glimpse as they are swept by in their broughams, 
with the sais in front and a eunuch on the box 
and the curtains half lowered. 

Besides these, much passes that is intended 
for your especial entertainment. Sellers of tur- 
quoises, which they dig out from various creases 
in their robes ; venders of stuffed crocodiles and 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 



123 



live monkeys ; strange men from the desert with 
a jackal, which they throw, bound by all four 
legs, and snarling and snapping, on the marble 
at your feet ; little girls who sing songs, and play 
accompaniments to them on their throats with 
the tips of their fingers ; women conjurers, who 
draw strings of needles and burning flax from 
their mouths, and who swallow nasty little wrig- 
gling snakes, and 
hatch pretty fluffy 
little chickens out of 
the slabs of the ter- 
race. Or else there 
is a troop of blue 
and white Egyptian 






SHADOW OF THE PYRAMID OF CHEOPS 

(From a Photograph taken on the top of the Pyramid just before sunset) 



soldiers marching by, or gorgeous young officers 
on polo ponies, or red-coated Tommies on don- 
keys, with their toes trailing in the dust and the 
ribbons of their Scotch caps floating out behind ; 
and consuls -general with gorgeous guards in 
gold lace, and with wicked-looking curved silver 



124 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

swords ; or the young Khedive himself, who 
comes with a great clatter of hoofs and bellow- 
ing sais before, and another galloping troop of 
cavalry in the rear, at the sound of which the 
people run to the curb and touch the fez, as he 
raises his hand to his, and rolls by in a cloud of 
dust. 

There are very good things to see, and with a 
companion on one side to explain them, and an- 
other on the other side to whom you can impart 
this information as though you had been born 
knowing it, you cannot spend a more entertain- 
ing afternoon. There is only one drawback, and 
that is a lurking doubt that you should be up 
and about seeing the show -places. Friday, in 
consequence, is the best day in Cairo, as all the 
things you ought to see are then closed, and you 
can sit still on the terrace with a clear conscience. 
Among the mosques and the tombs and the pal- 
aces and museums to which all good tourists go, 
and of which there are excellent descriptions, 
giving their various dimensions and other partic- 
ulars, in the guide-books, there are the Citadel 
and the Mosque of Mehemet Ali. The Citadel 
is the fortress built on the hill above the city, but 
which, with the Oriental incompleteness of that 
time, was reared upon high but not upon the 
highest ground. The sequel to this naturally was 
that when Mehemet Ali wanted the city of Cairo 
he sought out the highest ground, and dropped 
cannon-balls into the fortress until it capitulated. 
He afterwards asked all the Mamelukes to dinner 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 1 25 

at the Citadel, and then had them treacherously- 
killed — all but one, who rode his horse down the 
side of the Citadel and escaped. If you can im- 
agine the reservoir at Forty-second Street placed 
upon the top of Madison Square Garden, and a 
man riding down the side of it, you can under- 
stand what a very difficult and dangerous thing 
this was to do. There is no doubt that he did 
it, for I saw a picture of him in the very act in a 
book of history when I was at school, and I also 
have seen the marks of his horse's hoofs in the 
stone parapet of the Citadel, and they are just as 
fresh as they were three years ago, when they 
were on the other side. 

The Mosque of Mehemet Ali surmounts the 
Citadel, and its twin minarets are the distin- 
guishing mark of Cairo ; they are as conspicuous 
for miles above the city as is the dome of St. 
Paul's over London, and they are as light and 
graceful as it is impressive and heavy. The 
men on guard tie big yellow shoes on your feet 
before they allow you to enter this mosque, the 
outer court -yard of which is floored with ala- 
baster, over which you slide as though you 
were on a mirror or a sheet of ice. It is very 
beautiful, and one is as unwilling to walk on it 
as to tramp in muddy boots over a satin train. 
The floor of the mosque is covered with the 
most magnificent rugs, as wide -spreading as a 
sheet and as heavy as so much gold ; alabaster 
pillars reach to the top of the square, empty 
building, and from these rise five domes, colored 



126 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

blue and red, and lightened with gilded letters. 
It is very rich -looking, gloomy, silent, and im- 
pressive. It is the best of the mosques. From 
the outside, on the ramparts, you can see Cairo 
stretching out below for miles in a level gray 
jumble of flat roofs and rounded domes and slen- 
der minarets, with the high walls of a palace here 
and the thick green of a park there to break the 
monotony ; beyond it lies the Nile, a twisting 
ribbon of silver; and beyond that rich green fields 
and canals and bunches of palm-trees ; and seven 
miles away, where the green ceases and the desert 
begins, are three monuments of gray stone, look- 
ing, at that distance, disappointingly small and 
familiarly commonplace. It is not, I think, until 
you have seen them several times, and have 
climbed to their top and gazed up at them from 
below, that you appreciate the pyramids as you 
had expected to appreciate them ; but after 
they have laid their charm upon you, you will 
find yourself twisting your neck to take an- 
other look, or going out of your way to see 
them again before the sun has said good -night 
to them, as it has done ever since it first climbed 
over the edge of the world and found them wait- 
ing there. 

There is a mosque on the outside of the city 
which people visit on certain days to see the 
howling dervishes go through their peculiar form 
of worship. This mosque consists of four square 
walls with a dome. It is whitewashed within, 
and bare and rude and old. The sunlight enters 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 1 27 

it through square holes cut in the dome, and 
beats upon thirty or forty men who stand in a 
semicircle facing the East. They are of all sorts, 
from Arabs of the desert with long hair and wild 
eyes, to fat, pleased-looking merchants from the 
bazars, and the beggars and water-carriers of the 
streets. Around them on chairs are the tourists 
and the residents, like the spectators at a play 
rather than the guests of a religious sect watch- 
ing a religious ceremony. Most of the men wear 
their hats, and some of the women take careful 
notes and make sketches. They reminded me 
of medical students at a clinic when a man is 
being cut up. An archdeacon from one of our 
Western cities wore his hat, to show, probably, 
that he disapproved of the whole thing ; but as 
he used to eat with his knife while on board the 
Fulda^ his conduct in any place was not to be 
considered. The priest recites something from 
the Koran, and the men repeat it, moving their 
bodies back and forward as they do so with grad- 
ually increasing rapidity. What they may be say- 
ing is quite unintelligible, and the chorus they 
make resembles that of no human sound, but 
rather the gasping or panting of an animal. It 
is to the visitor absolutely without any religious 
significance ; all that is impressive about it is its 
horrible earnestness and its at times repulsive re- 
sults. As the voice of the priest grows more 
accentuated the bodies of the men swing farther 
and lower, until their hair sweeps the floor, and 
their eyes, when they throw their bodies back, 



128 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

are on a level with those of the spectators. A 
drum beats in quickening time to the voice of the 
priest and to the gasps of the dervishes, and a 
flute playing a weird accompaniment seems to 
mock at their fierce grunts and breathings. It 
was one of the most unpleasant exhibitions I 
ever witnessed, and affected one's nerves to such 
a degree that several of the women had to 
leave. The eyes of the men rolled in their sock- 
ets, and their lips parted, and through their 
clinched teeth came fiercer and louder gasps, 
until the chorus of sound reached you like the 
quick panting of an engine as it draws out of 
a station. The sweat ran from them like water 
from a sponge, and the veins stood out on their 
faces, showing in congested knots beneath the 
skin. Some of them groaned, and others shrieked 
and cried out, " Allah ! Allah !" This acted like 
the strokes of a whip on the others, who rocked 
more and more violently, and swung them- 
selves almost off their feet. Then, as the mu- 
sic grew fainter the motion of the bending 
bodies grew less vigorous and finally ceased, and 
the men stood rigid, some apparently unmoved 
and unconcerned, and others turning and reeling 
in a fit. 

While this was going forward, and you felt as 
though you were assisting at a heathen rite in 
which self-punishment was being inflicted as a bid 
for God's indulgence, two interesting things hap- 
pened. An officer in the English Army of Oc- 
cupation turned to his dragoman and cried at 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 



129 



the top of his voice, 
angrily : '' Do you 
call this worth ten 
piasters? Well, I 
don't. Now if you've 
got anything to 
show me, take me 
to see it. This isn't 
worth coming to see. 
You're a rank im- 
postor." 

The other thing 
was the act of a 
native woman, who 
brought her child to 
the door and hand- 
ed it to a priest, who 
took it in his arms 
and passed with it in 
front of the swing- 
ing, gasping, crazy 
semicircle of men. 
The child was about 
three years old, and 
was dying, and the 
mother had brought 
it there to be cured 
by the breath of the 
dervishes. As it 
passed before them, 
the hair of some of 
the men swept its 
9 





A SECTION OF THE PYRAMID 



130 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

arm, and it turned its frightened eyes up to those 
of the priest, who smiled gravely down upon the 
baby and bore him outstretched in his arms three 
times in front of the swinging crescent. The 
faith of the child's mother appealed to some of 
us more than did the Englishman's desire to get 
his money's worth. The incident is only of in- 
terest here as showing perhaps why the Army 
of Occupation is not as popular as it might be. 
This officer was no doubt an excellent soldier — 
the ribbons on his tunic showed that — and no 
one would have thought of questioning his abil- 
ity to handle raw recruits or his knowledge of 
tactics. But in handling the Egyptian tactics do 
not count for so much as tact. 

There are several ways of reaching the pyra- 
mids, and it is eminently in keeping with the 
other incongruities of the place and time that the 
most popular way of visiting them is on a four- 
in-hand coach, with a guard in a red coat and a 
bell-shaped white beaver tooting on his horn, and 
a young gentleman with a boutonniere and an 
unhappy smile holding the reins and working his 
way in and out between long strings of camels. 
There is a very smart hotel about two hundred 
yards from the foot of the pyramids, and you 
take a donkey there or a camel and ride up a 
sandy road to the base of the Pyramid of Cheops. 
There are then several things that you may do. 
You can either climb to the top of this first pyra- 
mid, or crawl into its interior, or walk over to see 
the Sphinx, or make a tour of subterranean tombs 



-CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE I3I 

and passageways of alabaster and polished stones, 
which are lighted for you by magnesium wire or 
stumps of candles. 

It seems absurd to say that the Sphinx is dis- 
appointing, but so many who have seen it say so 
that I feel I am one of many, and not individu- 
ally lacking in reverence or imagination. In the 
first place, the approach to it is bad ; you come 
at the Sphinx not from the front, but from the 
rear, where all you can see of it is a round ball of 
crumbling stone spreading out from a neck of 
broken outline, much smaller and meaner than 
you had imagined it would be. In the second 
place, instead of looking up at it, or having it 
look down at you, you view it first from a semi- 
circular ridge of sand, at the bottom of which it 
reposes, and at such a near view that whatever 
outline or character of countenance it once pos- 
sessed is lost. I have seen photographs of the 
Sphinx, taken while I was in Cairo, much more 
impressive than the Sphinx itself. Lying in a 
hollow of the sand hills as it does, the farther you 
move away from it in order to get a better focus, 
the less you see of it, and as you draw nearer to 
it it loses its meaning, as does the scenery of a 
theatre when you are on the wrong side of the 
foot-lights. I know that that is an unpopular 
thing to say, and that there are many who feel 
thrills when they first look upon the face of the 
Sphinx, and who describe their emotions to you 
at length, and who write down their impressions 
in their diaries when they get back to the hotel. 



132 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

But they have come a long way expecting to be 
thrilled, and they do not intend to be disappoint- 
ed. Some of the sphinxes in the museum of 
Gizeh, which you pass on your way to the pyra- 
mids, impressed me more than did the one great 
Sphinx, though they were indoors and surround- 
ed by attendants and the cheap decoration of the 
museum, once a palace for the harem. They 
Vere of green stone and of huge proportions, and 
with " the curling lip and sneer of cold com- 
mand"; and if you look at them long enough 
you feel uncomfortable shivers down your back, 
and a perfectly irrational impulse to rush at them 
and beat them in the face and force them to tell 
you what they know and what they have kept 
back and have been keeping back for centuries 
and centuries. Their faces show that they know 
all that we know and much besides that we shall 
never know, and when the world at last comes 
to an end they will stretch themselves and smile 
at one another and say : " Now tJiey know it, but 
we knew it all the while. We could have told 
had we liked, but we have enjoyed watching 
them fretting and fuming and prying about and 
tinkering at our faces with their little hammers, 
and blowing us up with saltpetre only to try and 
put us back again with steam. We who have kept 
our secret from Herodotus and Caesar, are we like- 
ly to give it up to Ebers and Mark Twain ?" 

But this same Sphinx by moonlight impressed 
me more than did anything I saw in the East. 
Not as one sees it by day, with tourists and pho- 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE I33 

tographers and donkey -boys making it cheap 
and familiar, but at night, when the tourists had 
gone to bed, and the donkey-boys had been paid 
to keep out of sight, and the moonHght threw the 
great negro face and the pyramids back of it into 
shadows of black and lines of silver, and the yel- 
low desert stretched away on either side so empty 
and silent that I thought I was alone and back 
two thousand years in the past, discovering the 
great monuments for myself, and for the first time. 
Before you ascend the Pyramid of Cheops you 
must deal with a middle-man in the person of the 
sheik of the pyramids, who selects guides for you, 
and who acts as though the pyramids were his 
private show, and he was both sole proprietor 
and ticket-taker at the door. He lives in a vil- 
lage near by, and he and his forefathers have al- 
ways been allowed a monopoly of the pyramids, 
and distribute their patronage to those guides 
who will pay them the highest percentage of 
what they receive from the visitors. You have 
three men to help you, two to pull, and one to 
push and to dilate on the view. It takes over 
ten minutes to climb to the top, with the men 
jerking at your wrists, and the third man shov- 
ing you from below. It is not a difficult feat, 
and women accomplish it every day, but it leaves 
you in a breathless state when you reach the sum- 
mit, and you are stiff above the knees for a day 
or two after you have come down. When you 
have reached the summit the guides cheer feebly 
to give you the idea that you have accomplished 



134 'J^'HE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

something which has often been attempted be- 
fore, but never so successfully; but you are not 
deceived, and you do not feel like cheering your- 
self. The view is worth the climb, however, and 
the sight of the shadow of the pyramid, spread- 
ing out over the villages and canals below like a 
black cloud, impresses you more with its immen- 
sity than the fact that it is a hundred feet higher 
than the top of the Diana on the Madison Square 
Garden tower. I am sure of this fact, because 
the man who built the Madison Square Garden 
assured me of it between breaths on the summit 
of the pyramid. While you are resting, the thing 
to do is to pay one of the guides to attempt to 
run down the pyramid you are on, cross the heavy 
sand to the pyramid beyond, and reach its top in 
eight minutes. When you give the word he dis- 
appears with a bound and drops into space, skip- 
ping and jumping and growing smaller and small- 
er as he goes, until he looks like a fluttering 
handkerchief ; and when he reaches the sand he 
is as small as a child of three, and his ascent of 
the other pyramid suggests a white pigeon shuf- 
fling up the steep roof of a barn. It is distinctly 
on his part a sporting thing to do. The descent 
of the pyramid is very much worse than going up, 
and you need to go very slowly, and not to look 
too often at the people crawling about like ants 
below. Only four men, however, in six years 
have slipped and fallen during this descent, and 
one of them had been drinking. They were all 
killed. The more you see of the pyramids the 




DAHAIJEEYAHS ON THE NILE BEFORE CAIRO 



CAIRO AS A SHOW-PLACE 1 37 

more you want to see of them, although I think 
one ascent is all perhaps you will care about tak- 
ing ; but their dignity and the wonder of their 
being where they are, and for so long, increases 
with every look at them. You cannot grow too 
familiar with the pyramids. They will not have it. 

On the road back from the Pyramids of Gizeh 
there are other pyramids within sight of Cairo, 
but these are those with which the Sphinx is as- 
sociated. You will see here one of the most 
beautiful sights of Cairo, the dahabeeyahs on the 
Nile. They and their white sails, especially when 
they come wing and wing before the wind, are 
the most beautiful of floating objects, and when 
there are hundreds of them coming towards you 
in lessening perspective, with the sun shining on 
the sails, and the banks on either side alive and 
moving with the palms, the river Nile becomes 
the best part of Cairo. 

There is another place on the Nile which you 
should visit, and to which tourists seldom go. 
This is the isle of Rodda, on the bank of which 
Moses was found, and where you may see the 
Nilometer. This is a well about sixteen feet in 
diameter, connected by a channel with the Nile. 
It is made of masonry, and down one side there 
runs a column on which are inscribed ancient 
Arabian and Cufic numerals, or what answer for 
numerals. It was dug many centuries ago, and 
it marks the rising and falling of the river, and at 
the same time the prosperity or dismay of Egypt. 
When the tide begins to rise, this rude instru- 



138 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

ment is watched hourly, and the hopes of the 
people rise and fall as the muddy water moves up 
or down the narrow well. When it reaches a 
certain height the sheik in charge declares that 
the time has come for cutting the banks and ir- 
rigating the land. In ancient days the rate of 
taxation was determined by the height of the in- 
undation, and it is said that the sheik in charge 
of the Nilometer is still under the influence of 
the government, to whose advantage it is to make 
the fellahin believe that the inundation is favor- 
able. It was the engineers under Napoleon who 
discovered that the Nilometer was being tam- 
pered with, but there is no likelihood of its being 
abused to-day under the English, whose improve- 
ment of the irrigation of Egypt has been their 
best work, and for the fellahin's best good. But it 
is interesting, nevertheless, to look down into the 
old well, overgrown with vines and surrounded 
by ruin and crumbling walls and broken lattices, 
and to think that for centuries it brought news 
of famine or of plenty, and that it was,-primitive 
as its construction is, the pulse of Egypt. 

The pulse of Egypt to-day is not shown in the 
mere rising or falling of a body of water. It is 
less primitive in its construction, and no one 
knows which way it is going to jump. In the 
next chapter I shall try to tell something of the 
men who have their fingers on Egypt's pulse, 
and who are agreed in only one thing — that there 
are too many fingers for Egypt's good. 




THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 

^|^§HEN the visitor to Cairo first grasps 
the extent of his own ignorance of 
Egypt, and appreciates that if he is 
to understand its monuments and 
the signs of past times about him 
he must study the history of the whole world 
for forty centuries, he is apt to retreat precip- 
itately. Later, as a compromise, he proposes 
skipping thirty-nine centuries and limiting his re- 
searches to the study of the political and social 
conditions of Egypt during the last ten years. 
And when he begins jauntily on this he finds that 
all that has gone before, from Rameses II. to 
Mehemet Ali, is as simple as the line of Popes in 
comparison with the anomalies and intricacies of 
government that have arisen within the last dec- 
ade. Yet the very intricacies of the subject give 
to this study a fascination entirely apart from its 
rare picturesqueness, and no*matter what manner 
of man he may be, he cannot but find some side 
of the situation which appeals to him. If his mind 
be constituted like that of a ready reckoner he 



140 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

can revel in unravelling the intricacies of the 
Caisse and the Laws of Liquidation ; if it is judi- 
cial, he can perhaps elucidate the powers of the 
Mixed Tribunal ; if romantic, he has the career 
of Ismail, the most magnificent of patriots and 
profligate of nionarchs ; and if it turns towards 
adventure and the clash of arms, he can read of 
the heroic fanaticism ot Fuzzy Wuzzy, the son 
of the Mahdi, of the futile mission of Gordon, of 
Stewart's march across the desert, and of the des- 
perate valor of the fight at Aboo-Klea. 

But it is the paradoxical nature of Egypt's 
present situation which gives it its chief interest, 
and lends to it the peculiar fascination of a puz- 
zle, or one of Whistler's witticisms. For, while 
Egypt is not free, as is Morocco, nor under a 
protectorate, as is Tunis, she is still free and still 
protected. She is free to coin money, to main- 
tain an army, and to make treaties ; and yet she 
pays six million dollars a year tribute to Turkey 
as a part of the Ottoman Empire, and her army 
that she is allowed to maintain is officered by Eng- 
lish soldiers, whom she is also allowed to maintain. 
She may not pay out the money she is allowed 
to coin without the consent of foreigners ; she 
cannot punish the man who steals this money, be 
he Greek, English, or American, without the ap- 
proval of these foreigners ; and hfer official lan- 
guage is that of one foreign power, her ostensible 
protector is another, and her real protector is still 
another, whose commands are given under the 
irritating disguise of "■ advice." 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT I43 

Alfred Milner, the late under-secretary for fi- 
nance in Egypt, whose England in Egypt is the 
best book on the subject, though it reads like a 
novel, has put it in this way : " It is not given 
to mortal intelligence to understand at one blow 
the complexities of Turkish suzerainty and for- 
eign treaty rights ; to realize the various pow- 
ers of interference and obstruction possessed by 
consuls and consuls -general, by commissioners 
of the public debt, and other mixed administra- 
tions ; to distinguish English officers who are 
English from English officers who are Egyptian, 
foreign judges of the international courts from 
foreign judges of the native courts; to follow 
the writhings of the Egyptian government in its 
struggle to escape from the fine meshes of the 
capitulations ; to appreciate precisely what laws 
that government can make with the consent of 
only six powers, and for what laws it requires the 
consent of no less than fourteen." 

It seems rather unfair to saddle the responsi- 
bility for all of these burdens and for this re- 
markable condition of affairs, which is unequalled 
in history, upon the shoulders of one man, but 
one man is responsible for it directly and indi- 
rectly. He is still alive, a hanger-on at the 
court of the Sultan of Turkey, he who was at 
one time the most picturesque monarch of the 
world. Ismail Pasha became Khedive a little 
before the time of the close of our Civil War. 
Egypt had never been more prosperous than then 
— owing but fifteen million dollars. In 1 876, when 



144 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

Ismail was deposed and his son Tewfik Pasha put 
in his place, he had increased the debt of Egypt to 
four hundred and forty-five million dollars. Is- 
mail was a typical Oriental ruler ; he had the typ- 
ical Oriental ruler's French veneer and education, 
a combination which has been found to produce 
most serious results. When an Oriental is left 
alone he is a barbarian, or he used to be ; now, 
after he has been made the talk of Paris for nine 
days, and has been given a state dinner at Marl- 
borough House, and a few stars for his coat, and 
called ^' cousin," he goes home with no particular 
disgust for his former eccentricities of mis- gov- 
ernment, but with a quiver full of new tastes, de- 
sires, and ambitions, and thereafter plays his role 
of monarch with one eye on the grand stands of 
Europe. He wants their good opinion, but he 
wants to get it in his own way — the old way. He 
begins to build railroads and hospitals, but he con- 
tinues, after his past custom, to draw the money 
for such improvements from licensed gambling- 
houses or from the sale of opium. He has a 
French cook, but he retains the kurbash ; he puts 
up telephones, but he does not give up the bow- 
string. 

Ismail was the first Khedive who discovered 
that the easiest way to get money is to borrow 
it. He found that all one has to do is to sign a 
paper, and you get the money. It was very easy 
for Ismail to borrow money, because the credit 
of Egypt was good and sound in itself, and be- 
cause foreigners, who even at that time swarmed 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 



H5 



in Egypt, knew that the repudiation of debts, 
while possible in a powerful or free government, 
was not to be feared from that country. So there 
began a reign of extravagance for which history 
has no parallel. If 
'' money breeds mon- 
ey," it is also true 
that those who spend 
money freely are giv- 
en more chances to 
do so than any one 
else. Adventurers, 
charlatans, rascals of 
every climate and 
every nationality, 
swarmed down upon 
Cairo, and fought 
with one another 
for a chance to glut 
themselves at the re- 
past which this reck- 
less profligate spread 

for all comers. No man probably was ever so 
basely cheated as was Ismail, or on so magnifi- 
cent a scale. And nothing remains but ruins to 
show where the money spent on his own per- 
sonal pleasure was bestowed. That other mag- 
nificent reprobate, William M. Tweed, left mon- 
uments like the Court House to commemorate 
his thefts of public money ; but Ismail's pal- 
aces are falling in pieces, the rain has washed 
the paint off the boards, the tips of the crescents 




RIAZ PASHA, 
Prime-minister of Egypt 



10 



146 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

are broken, and great gardens filled with foun- 
tains and mosaic paths are choked with weeds and 
covered with fallen leaves and the dirt and dust 
of neglect and decay. You can walk over long 
marble floors which have sunk by their own 
weight through the rotten foundations, and see 
yourself at full length in bleared mirrors sur- 
rounded by the gilt borders and blue silken cur- 
tains of the Second Empire. Ismail ordered 
these palaces as men order hats, and threw them 
away as you toss an empty cartridge from a gun- 
barrel. And that was all the most of them ever 
were, empty cartridges, mere shells of wood paint- 
ed to look like marble, and gilding and mirrors, 
as tasteless as the buildings at the Centennial 
Exposition, and lasting as long. 

And yet they pleased him, and he ordered 
more and more, so that wherever his eye might 
rest it would fall upon a palace which would 
serve as a fitting covering for his royal person, 
and as a testimony to his magnificence. He 
wanted many, and he wanted them at once. He 
had them built at night by the light of candles. 
The Palace of Gizeh, which is now a museum, 
was reared in this way while Cairo slept, and 
at a cost of twenty- four million dollars. The 
curtains ordered for its windows cost one thou- 
sand dollars each, and when it was found that 
they did not fit the windows, the entire front of 
the building was torn down, and a new front 
with windows to match the curtains was put in 
its place. He built an opera-house as fine as 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 1 47 

that of Covent Garden in six months, and a grot- 
to as dark and cool as the Mammoth Cave, with 
stalactites of painted rope and rocks of papier- 
mache and mud, with its sides Hned with aquari- 
ums, in which swam strange fish. The wind and 
the dust play through this grotto to-day ; for he 
no sooner reared a palace in air than he turned 
from it to some new toy. These are the things 
you can see. You can hear stories — some of 
them true, some of them possible — of things that 
are past, such as his swimming- tanks where a 
hundred of the slaves of the harem bathed to- 
gether for his edification ; the pie out of which, 
when it was opened, there stepped a ballet-dan- 
cer ; and the story of the disappearance of the 
Pasha who grew too rich. This is, unfortunately, a 
true story, and not one out of the Arabian Nights. 
This Pasha was invited by Ismail to see a new 
dahabeeyah, and never returned. But one of 
the attendants on the Khedive came back some 
weeks later with his finger bitten off at the joint. 
He and Ismail alone know where the Pasha who 
was too rich has gone. 

These extravagances and these eccentricities 
were all in keeping with our idea of what an 
Oriental despot should be, but it would be most 
unfair and ungenerous to give only this side of 
Ismail's character. He was a man of much mind 
and of large ideas, as well as a man with the 
tastes of a voluptuary, and the means, for a time, 
of a Count of Monte Cristo. It was he who 
built the harbor of Alexandria ; and the railways 



148 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

and canals that others have completed were 
started under his regime. All of these things — 
railroads, palaces, canals, and grottos made of 
mud — cost money ; and there were other ex- 
penses. Knights of industry and rascals of all 
degrees extorted vast fortunes from him in in- 
demnities for supposed failures on h.is part to 
keep up with his agreements, and to stick to the 
letter of concessions. Some of these, like the pay- 
ment of fifteen million dollars to the Suez Canal 
Company, were just enough; but there was also 
an enormous sum given in backsheesh to Turkey 
to gain the consent of the Porte to a proposed 
change in the line of succession and the estab- 
lishment of the rule of primogeniture. Up to 
that time the eldest male member of the ruling 
family had always succeeded to power, but Ismail 
obtained a firman from the Sultan allowing his 
son to follow him. The gratification of this nat- 
ural vanity or love of family was not obtained 
for the asking, and cost his people dear. They 
were already groaning under a multitude of 
taxes ; the army was unpaid ; the bureaucracy 
was rotten throughout ; bribery and extortion, 
unfair taxation, and open seizure of the property 
of others had reduced the country almost to 
bankruptcy. Ismail in sixteen years had brought 
about a state of things that threatened utter ruin, 
to not only the native, but to the strangers within 
and without the gates. The strangers made the 
move for reform. I have told this much of Ismail 
not because it is new or unfamiliar, but because 




aS^J£A2^ 



AN EGYPTIAN LANCER 



THE ENGLISHlNIEN IN EGYPT 15I 

it shows how, through his misrule, the foreign 
element was able to obtain a footing upon the 
shore of Egypt, which footing has now grown to 
a trampling under foot of what is native and 
properly Egyptian. This entering wedge was 
called the Dual Control, and France and England 
were appointed receivers for Egypt, just as we 
appoint receivers for a badly managed railroad, 
and Ismail was deposed, his son Tewfik taking 
his place. 

But although this was the first important and 
most official recognition of the right of the 
stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already ob- 
tained peculiar rights in Egypt through capitula- 
tions, or those privileges granted in the past to 
foreign residents in Turkey and its dependent 
state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the 
foreigners who traded in these Oriental countries 
stood in actual need of protection from the na- 
tives. Because they were foreigners they were 
regarded with such lack of consideration that, in 
order to balance the disadvantages of having 
their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the 
Sultan gave them certain privileges — such as im- 
munity from taxation, immunity from arrest, the 
inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from 
the jurisdiction of the local courts. 

These privileges were unimportant when the 
foreign element in Constantinople was so little 
and so weak that the position of the Chinamen in 
San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aris- 
tocracy in comparison ; but the snake warmed at 



152 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

the hearth-stone grew^ and the Sultan's empire 
dwindled, and the privileges which were given to 
bribe the foreigner to come and to remain became 
a bane to Turkey and a curse to the weaker state 
of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for in- 
stance, is at this very day made use of by foreign- 
ers who are carrying on some wickedness or who 
have committed a crime for which they cannot 
be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is 
accompanied by an official representative of the 
country to which the foreigner belongs. Let us 
suppose, for example, that the police of New York 
wished to raid a gambling-house. This, I know, 
is asking a good deal of the reader's intelligence, 
but we will suppose it to be a gambling- house 
which has not paid its assessment to the police 
regularly, and which should be given a lesson. 
All that the proprietor of the house would have to 
do, did capitulations extend in New York, would 
be to lease the house to an Italian, or to take out 
papers of naturalization from the British govern- 
ment. You can imagine the chagrin of an officer 
of the law who, when he goes to make an arrest, 
is confronted with a German who says he is an 
Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly 
sacred. This, as you can imagine, would impede 
the wheels of justice. 

When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken 
out papers as an American citizen, flaunted this 
fact in the faces of the native police whenever 
they came to arrest him for keeping a gam- 
bling-house. They applied to our consul -gen- 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 



153 



eral, Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who 
so far differed from the etiquette observed by 
some other consuls -general in Cairo as not to 
delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent 
his soldiers to be present at the arrest. The of- 
fender met this by bringing forth another Amer- 
ican citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he 
claimed to have leased the house, and whose 
family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that the 
American flag did not look well as a cloak 
for gambling-houses, 
and being a young 
man who has assist- 
ed at county -seat 
fights and who can 
pitch three curves, 
said that if the rou- 
lette tables were not 
out of the house in 
twenty-four hours he 
would himself break 
them into kindling- 
wood with an axe. 
This incident shows 
how the capitula- 
tions of the sixteenth 
century are acting as 
stumbling-blocks to 

the Egyptian of to-day, even when the consuls- 
general are willing to assist the native govern- 
ment, which is seldom. 

This is not all. The immunity from full taxa- 




TIGRANE PASHA, 
Minister of Foreign Affairs 



154 'THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAlSf 

tion, now that the foreigners are among the rich- 
est inhabitants of Cairo, is most manifestly unjust ; 
and though the mixed courts of an international 
judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign 
resident, or lack of trial, in civil cases, by the sev- 
eral consuls -general, the abuses of the capitula- 
tions are still a grievous and most unjust imposi- 
tion by the great powers, ourselves included, upon 
a weaker one. To return to the Dual Control and 
to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold 
on Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular ; so 
was the foreigner and his capitulations, who, wax- 
ing fat on the weaknesses of the country after Is- 
mail's debauchery of its strength, grew insolent — 
so insolent that the cry raised by a general in the 
Khedive's army of '' Egypt for the Egyptians" was 
taken up, and found expression in the Arabist 
movement or rebellion. Its leader was Arabi 
Pasha. He wanted what the Know -Nothing 
party of America wanted — his country for his 
countrymen. What else he wanted for himself 
does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of 
the Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the 
people he was the would-be preserver of his coun- 
try against the plague of the foreign invasion. 

The trouble began at Alexandria, where the 
excited people attacked the foreign residents, kill- 
ing some, and destroying valuable property. Men- 
of-war of the two powers represented in the Dual 
Control had already arrived to put down the re- 
bellion. When the riot on shore was at its height, 
the Enghsh war-vessels bombarded the city. The 



The exglishmen in egvpt 155 

bombarding of Alexandria was war, but it was 
not magnificent. There are certain things made 
to be bombarded — forts and ships of war — but 
cities are not built for that purpose or with that 
ultimate end in view. The English people, as 
a people, however, regret the bombardment of 
Alexandria as much as any one. The French 
war -vessels, for their part, refused to join the 
bombardment, and so were requested by the 
English admiral to sail away and give the other 
half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different 
people give you different reasons for the depart- 
ure of the French fleet at this crisis. Some say 
that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and 
his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German 
wolf on the frontier, and pointed out the danger 
at home if the army and navy were engaged 
otherwise than in protecting the border. Others 
say that, like the good one of the two robbers in 
the Babes in the Wood, one of the Dual Control 
drew the line at murder or at the bombardment 
of a country she was supposed to protect. Plun- 
dering the Egyptians was possible, but not bom- 
barding their city. They stopped at that. The 
English followed up the bombardment of Alex- 
andria by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended 
the rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered 
at their approach, and the Khedive's rule was 
again undisturbed. The English remained, how- 
ever, to *' restore order," and to see to the " or- 
ganization of proper means for the maintenance 
of the Khedive's authority." They have been 



156 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

doing that now for ten years, and It is interesting 
to note that they have made so Httle progress 
that the last '' disorder " in Cairo Avas due to the 
action of the British consul-general himself in 
allowing the young Khedive just twenty -four 
hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet. 
This can hardly be described as " maintaining the 
authority of the Khedive," which the English 
had promised to do. 

After the battle of Tel-el-Kebir Great Britain 
stood undoubtedly in the position of the savior of 
the Khedive if not of Egypt. Her soldiers had 
crushed the rebellion, and as she had sent her 
Only General and one of the royal family and 
many thousands of good men to do it, and as 
she had lost not only men, but money, she 
thought she deserved something in return. The 
something she has taken in return has been 
taken gradually, and is the control of Egypt at 
the present day. It is possible that had the 
English not lost many more men and much more 
money in the campaign in the Soudan, which fol- 
lowed immediately after the suppression of Arabi, 
they might not have gone so far as they have gone 
in settling themselves in Egypt. But there was 
a not unnatural feeling that the Soudan cam- 
paign, which had cost so much, and which was a 
failure in all but in showing the bravery of the 
British troops, ought to be paid for, or made up 
to the English in some way. I should like to go 
into the story of this most picturesque and heroic 
of campaigns, but it would require a book by it- 




A CAMEL CORPS PATROL AT WADI HALFA 



THE ENC;LISHMEN in EGYPT 1 59 

self. Its history is briefly this : The religious and 
military chieftain known as ''the Mahdi," shortly 
after the defeat of Arabi, threatened all Egypt 
from the Soudan, which rose under his leadership. 
General Hicks, an Englishman, with ten thousand 
men, in the service of the Khedive, was sent 
against him. He was killed, and most of the 
troops with him. The English, who were at that 
time the only power in Egypt with authority of 
any sort back of it, and who were virtually in 
control, felt that they should take the responsi- 
bilities of their position as well as its benefits, 
and avenge the massacre, drive back the Mahdi's 
forces, and, if possible, crush him and them for 
all time. The campaign was later further com- 
plicated by the presence at Khartoom of Major- 
General C. G. Gordon, who had gone there to lead 
back in safety the Egyptian troops still remain- 
ing in the Soudan. He was, after his arrival at 
Khartoom, virtually a prisoner at that place, which 
is a mud city on the banks of the Nile far above 
the fifth cataract. The attempts to rescue him 
and to suppress the Mahdi were equally unsuc- 
cessful. 

This is, in a few words, the story of a cam- 
paign which has been unequalled within the last 
twenty years in picturesqueness, heroism, and 
dramatic surprises. It had been said that the old 
days of personal bravery, of hand-to-hand slaugh- 
ter, and of the attack and defence of man against 
man, were at an end ; that owing to the new 
weapons of war, by which an enemy can be at- 



l6o THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

tacked when several miles distant from the at- 
tacking party, when the pressing of an electric 
button destroys an army corps, and when turn- 
ing a handle will send three hundred bullets a 
minute into a mass of infantry, the necessity for 
personal courage was over. But seldom in his- 
tory has there been as fierce personal encounters 
as in the Soudan, or as unusual methods of war- 
fare. On the one hand were the naked support- 
ers of the Mahdi, armed with their spears and 
knives, and protected only by bull-hide shields, 
but actuated by a religious fanaticism that drove 
them exulting at their enemies, and with no 
fear of death, but with the belief that through it 
they would gain joyous and proud immortality. 
Against them were the British troops, outnum- 
bered ten to one, with hundreds of miles of sandy 
desert before, behind, and on every side of them, 
cut off from communication with the outside 
world, in a country barren and unfamiliar, and 
attacked by tens of thousands, who came when 
they pleased and where they pleased, rising as 
swiftly as a sand-storm rises, and disappearing 
again as suddenly into the desert. 

When I was in Cairo I was told of one of the 
Mahdi's men who continually rushed at a British 
square during an engagement holding his shield 
clear of his body as he advanced to throw a spear, 
and then retreated again. This looked like the 
worst form of foolhardiness to the English, until 
they saw that he was protecting with his shield 
his little boy, who was hiding behind it, and that 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 



l6l 




H. H. ABBAS II, 

Khedive of Egypt 



when the chance of- 
fered, this child, who 
could not have been 
more than seven, and 
who was as naked of 
protection as his fa- 
ther, would throw a 
spear of his own. The 
father was wounded 
four times, but each 
time the bullet struck 
him he only shook 
himself, as a dog 
shakes off water, and 

once more rushed forward. When he fell for the 
last time the boy tumbled across him, unconscious 
from a wound in his thigh. The surgeons dressed 
this wound and bandaged it; but when the child 
came to and saw what they had done, he leaped up 
and tore the clothes from around him, and then, 
as the blood from the reopened wound ran out, 
fell over backwards dead. The English officer 
who told this story asked if fighting such men 
could be considered agreeable work from any 
point of view. 

But the Soudan is only of interest here as show- 
ing how, having lost so much through it, the 
British did not feel more inclined than before to 
evacuate Egypt, although there were many who 
thought, as a few still think, that Egypt has cost 
them too much already, and more than they can 
ever get back. The loss of Gordon was perhaps 



II 



1 62 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

the disaster of all the most keenly felt. How 
keenly is shown partly by the statue the English 
have placed to him in Trafalgar Square, sur- 
rounded by their kings and greatest generals. It 
shows him with one foot placed on the battle- 
ment of Khartoom, with his arms folded, and with 
the head thrown slightly forward, looking out, as 
he had done for so many weary months, for the 
relief that came too late. This monument is a 
reproach to those whose uncertainty of mind and 
purpose cost Gordon his life. It was doing a 
brave thing to put it up in a public place, being, 
as it is, a standing reminder of the neglect and 
half-heartedness that lost a valuable life, and one 
that had been risked again and again for his 
country. It is not only a monument to General 
Gordon, but to the English people, who have had 
the courage to admit in bronze and stone that 
they were wrong. 

For the last ten years the English have been as 
tardy in getting out of Egypt as they were in 
going after Gordon into the Soudan. They have 
repeatedly declared their intention of evacuating 
the country, not only in answer to questions in 
the House, but in answer to the inquiries of for- 
eign powers. But they are still there. They 
have not been idle while there, and they have ac- 
complished much good, and have brought bene- 
fits innumerable to Egypt. They have improved 
her systems of irrigation, upon which the pros- 
perity of the land depends, have strengthened her 
army, have done away with the corvee, or tax 



I 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 1 63 

paid on labor, and with the kurbash, or whip used 
in punishment, and, what is much the most won- 
derful, they have brought her out of ruin into 
such a condition of prosperity that she not only 
pays the interest on her enormous debt, but has a 
little left over for internal improvements. There 
has also been a marked change for the better in 
the condition of the courts of justice, and there 
has been an extension of a railroad up the Nile 
as far as Sirgeh. 

But the English to-day not only want credit 
for having done all this, but they want credit for 
having done it unselfishly and without hope or 
thought of reward, and solely for the good of 
mankind and of Egypt in particular. They re- 
mind me of those of the G. A. R. who not only 
want pensions and medals, but to be considered 
unselfish saviors of their country in her hour of 
need. There is no reason why a man should not 
be held in honor for risking his life for his coun- 
try's sake, and honors, if he wants them, should 
be heaped upon him, but not money too. He 
either served his country because he was loyal 
and brave, or because he wanted money in return 
for taking certain risks. Let him have either the 
honors or the money, but he should not be so 
greedy as to want both. England has made a 
very good thing out of Egypt, and she has not 
yet got all she will get, but she wants the world 
to forget that and look upon her as an unselfish 
and enlightened nation that is helping a less pros- 
perous and less powerful people to get upon their 



164 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

feet again. Of course it is none of our business 
(at least it is our policy to say so) when England 
stalks forth like a roaring lion seeking what she 
may devour all over the world. Americans travel 
chiefly upon the Continent, and unless they go 
into out-of-the-way corners of the world they have 
no idea how little there is left of it that has not 
been seized by the people of Great Britain. For 
my own part I find one grows a little tired of 
getting down and sailing forth and landing again 
always under the shadow of the British flag. If 
the United States should begin with Hawaii and 
continue to annex other people's property, we 
should find that almost all of the best corner lots 
and post -office sites of the world have been 
already pre-empted. Senator Wolcott once said 
to Senator Quay : '' I understand, Quay, you want 
the chairmanship of the Library Committee. You 
seem to want the earth ; if you don't look out you 
will interfere with my plans." 

If the United States had taken away the little 
princess's island from her and continued to plunder 
weaker nations, she would have found that Eng- 
land wants the earth too, and that she is in a fair 
way of getting it if some one does not stop her 
very soon. There are a number of good people in 
England who believe that for the last ten years 
theircountrymen have spent their time and money 
in redeeming Egypt as a form of missionary work, 
and there are others quite as naive who put the 
whole thing in a word by saying, " What would we 
do with our younger sons if it was not for Egypt ?" 




THE GUN MULE OF THE MULE BATTERY 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 1 67 

Three-fourths of the officers in the army of the 
Khedive are Enghsh boys, who rank as second 
lieutenants at home and as majors in Egypt. 
They are paid just twice what they are paid in 
the English army, and it is the Khedive who 
pays them and not the English. In this way 
England obtains three things : she is saved the 
cost of supporting that number of officers ; she 
gets the benefit of their experience in Egypt, 
which is an excellent training-school, at the ex- 
pense of the Egj^'ptians ; and she at the same 
time controls the Egyptian army by these same 
officers, and guards her own interests at Egypt's 
cost. And as if this were not enough, she plants 
an Army of Occupation upon the country, and 
with it menaces the native authority. The irri- 
gation of Egypt has of late been carried on by 
Englishmen entirely and paid for by Egypt ; 
her railroads are built by the English ; her big 
contracts are given out to English firms and to 
English manufacturers ; and the railroad which 
will be built to Kosseir on the Red Sea may 
have been designed in Egypt's interest to carry 
wheat, or it may have been planned to carry 
troops to the Red Sea in the event of the 
seizure of the Suez Canal or of any other im- 
pediment to the shortest route to India. We 
may not believe that the Egyptians are capable 
of governing themselves, we may believe that it 
is written that others than themselves shall al- 
ways rule them and their country, but we must 
prefer that whoever do this should declare them- 



1 68 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

selves openly, and act as conquerors who come 
and remain as conquerors, and not as "advisers" 
and restorers of order. Napoleon came to Cairo 
with flags flying and drums beating openly as an 
enemy ; he did not come in the disguise of a 
missionary or an irrigation expert. 

And there is always the question whether if 
left alone the Egyptians of the present day could 
not govern themselves. Those of the Egyptians 
I met who were in authority are not men who 
are likely to return to the debauchery and mis- 
rule of Ismail. They would be big men in any 
country; they are cultivated, educated gentle- 
men, who have served in different courts or on 
many important diplomatic missions, and whose 
tastes and ambitions are as creditable and as 
broad as are those of their English contempo- 
raries. 

The two most prominent advisers of the Khe- 
dive at present are his Prime - minister, Riaz 
Pasha, and his Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ti- 
grane Pasha. The first of these is a Turk, the 
second an Armenian and a Christian. It is told 
of Riaz that he was brought to Egypt when a 
boy as a slave. A man who can rise from such a 
beginning to be Prime-minister must have somie- 
thing in him. He showed his spirit and his de- 
sire for his country's good in the time of Ismail, 
whose extravagances both he and Nubar Pasha 
strenuously opposed, and his aid to the English 
in establishing Egyptian finance on a firmer foot- 
ing was ready and invaluable. He has held al- 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 



169 



most every position in the cabinet of Egypt, and* 
is not too old a man to learn new methods, and if 
left alone is experienced and accomplished enough 
as a statesman to manage for himself. 

Tigrane Pasha struck me as being more of a 
diplomat than a statesman, but he showed his 
strength by the fact that he understood the weak 
points of the Egyptians as well as their virtues. 
It is not the enthusiast who believes that all in 
his country is perfect who is the best patriot. 
To say that such a man as this — a man who has 
a better knowledge of many different govern- 
ments than half of the English cabinet have of 
their own, and who wishes the best for his Khe- 
dive and his country — needs the advice or support 
of an English resident minister, is as absurd as to 
say that the French 
cabinet should gov- 
ern themselves by 
the manifestoes of 
the Comte de Paris. 
These men are not 
barbarians nor des- 
pots ; they have not 
gained their place in 
the world by favor or 
inheritance. Their 
homes are as rich in 
treasures of art and 
history and literature 
as are the homes of ^^^^ ^,^0,^^^^ 

i—Ord ivOSebery or bU' The English Diplomatic Agem in Egypt 




lyo THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

Henry Drummond Wolff, and if they care for 
their country and the authority of their Khedive, 
it is certainly hard that they may not have the 
right of serving both undisturbed. 

The Khedive himself has been very generally 
represented through the English press as a " sulky 
boy " who does not know what is best for him. 
It is just as easy to describe him as a plucky boy 
who wishes to govern his own country and his 
own people in his own way. And not only is he 
not allowed to do this, but he is treated with a 
lack of consideration by his protectors which adds 
insult to injury, and makes him appear as having 
less authority than is really his. He might very 
well say to Lord Cromer, '^ It was all very well to 
dissemble your love, but why did you kick me 
down-stairs?" 

Sir Evelyn Baring, now Lord Cromer, and the 
ruling figure in Egypt, has served his country as 
faithfully and as successfully as any man in her 
debt to-day. He has been in Egypt from the 
beginning of these ten years, and he has been 
given almost unlimited power and authority by 
his own country, of which his nominal position of 
Consul-General and Diplomatic Agent is no cri- 
terion. He is a typical Englishman in appear- 
ance, broad-shouldered and big all over, with a 
smooth-shaven face, and the look of having just 
come fresh from a bath. In conversation he 
thinks much more of what he has to say than of 
how he says it ; by that I mean that he is direct, 
and even abrupt ; the Egyptians found him most 



I 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 17I 

unpleasantly so. But were he more tactful, he 
would probably have been better liked person- 
ally, but would not have succeeded in doing what 
he has done so well. 

I do not like what he has done, but I want to 
be fair in showing that for the work he was sent 
to do he is probably the best man England could 
have selected. A man less self-reliant might 
have feared to compromise himself with home 
authorities, and would have temporized and lost 
where Lord Cromer bullied and browbeat and 
won. He is a very remarkable man. He stud- 
ies for a half-hour every day after breakfast, and 
plays tennis in the afternoon. When he is in 
his own room, \vith a pipe in his mouth, he 
can talk more interestingly and with more exact 
knowledge of Egypt than any man in the world, 
and your admiration for him is unbounded. In 
the rooms of the legation, on the contrary, or, 
again, w^hen advising a minister of the Khedive 
or the Khedive himself, he can be as intensely 
disagreeable in his manner and as powerfully 
aggressive as a polar-bear. During the last so- 
called " crisis " he gave the Khedive twenty-four 
hours in which to dismiss his Prime- minister. 
He did this with the assurance from the English 
Foreign Ofifice that the home government would 
support him. He then cabled with one hand to 
Malta for troops and with the other stopped the 
Black Watch at Aden on their way to India, and 
called them back to Cairo, after which he went 
out in full sight of the public and banged tennis 



172 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

balls about until sunset. A man who can call 
out '' forty, love !" *' forty, fifteen !" in a calm voice 
two hours after sending an ultimatum to a Khe- 
dive and disarranging the movements of six thou- 
sand of her Majesty's troops will get what he 
wants in the end, and a boy of eighteen is hardly 
a fair match for him. 

As I have said, the English press have mis- 
represented the young Khedive in many ways. 
He is, in the first place, much older both in ap- 
pearance and manner and thought than his age 
would suggest, and if he is sulky to Englishmen 
it is not to be wondered at. They could hard- 
ly expect his Highness to regard them as seri- 
ously as his friends as they regard themselves. 
The Khedive gave me a private audience at the 
Abdine Palace while I was in Cairo, and from 
what he said then and from what others who are 
close to him told me of him, I obtained a very 
different idea of his personality than I had re- 
ceived from the English. 

He struck me as being distinctly obstinate — a 
characteristic which is so marked in our President 
that it can only be considered one of the qualifi- 
cations for success, and is probably the quality in 
the Khedive which the English describe as sulki- 
ness. What I liked in him most was his pride 
in his army and in the Egyptian people as Egyp- 
tians. It is always well that a ruler should be so 
enthusiastic over what is his own that he shows 
it even to the casual stranger, for if he exhibits it 
to him, how much more will he show it to his 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 1 75 

people ! The Khedive has gentle tastes, and is 
said to find his amusement in his garden and 
among flowers and on the farm lands of his es- 
tates ; he speaks several languages very well, and 
dresses and looks — except for the fez and his at- 
tendants — like any other young man of twenty- 
three or twenty-four in Paris or New York. His 
ministers, who know him best, describe him as 
having a high spirit, and one that, as he grows 
older and will be guided by greater experience, 
will lead him to firmer authority for his own good 
and for the good of his people. 

One remark of the Khedive's which is of inter- 
est to Americans was to the effect that the offi- 
cers in his army who had been trained by Stone 
Bey, and those other American officers who en- 
tered the Egyptian army after the end of our Civil 
War, were, in his opinion, the best-trained men in 
their particular department in his army. This is 
the topographical work, and the making of maps 
and drawings ; but those Americans who are in 
charge of Egyptian troops on the frontier are also 
well esteemed. It is the English, however, who 
have made the fighting part of the army what it 
is. Before they came the troops were unpaid, 
and badly treated by their officers, but now the 
infantry and the camel corps and artillery have 
no trouble in getting recruits. 

The Egyptian is not a natural fighter, as is the 
Soudanese, who fights for love of it, but he has 
shown lately that when properly officered and 
trained and well treated, he can defend a position 



176 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

or attack boldly if led boldly. I suggested to the 
Khedive that he should borrow some of our offi- 
cers, those who have succeeded so well with the 
negroes of the Ninth Cavalry and with the Ind- 
ians, for it seemed to me that this would be of 
benefit to both the officers and the Egyptian 
soldier. It was this suggestion that called forth 
the Khedive's admiration for the Americans of 
his army ; but, as a matter of fact, the English 
would never allow officers of any other nation- 
ality than their own to control even a company 
of the Egyptian army. They cannot turn out 
those foreigners who are already in, but they can 
dictate as to who shall come hereafter, and they 
fill all the good billets with their own people ; 
and if there is one thing an Englishman appar- 
ently holds above all else, it is a" good billet." I 
know a good many English officers who would 
rather be stationed where there was a chance of 
their taking part in what they call a " show," and 
what we would grandly call a " battle," than dwell 
at ease on the staff of General Wolseley himself ; 
but, on the other hand, if I were to give a list of 
all the subalterns who have applied to me for 
" good billets in America," where they seem to 
think fortunes grow on hedges, half the regimen- 
tal colors from London to Malta would fade with 
shame. 

And Egypt is full of ''good billets." It is 
true the English have made them good, and 
they were not worth much before the English 
restored order ; but because you have humanely 



II 



THE ENGLISHMEN IN EGYPT 1 77 

stopped a runaway coach from going over a prec- 
ipice, that is no reason why you should take 
possession of it and fill it both inside and out 
with your own friends and relations. That is 
what England has done with the Egyptian coach 
which Ismail drove to the brink of bankruptcy. 

It is true the Khedive still sits on the box and 
holds the reins, but Lord Cromer sits beside him 
and holds the whip. 



VI 



MODERN ATHENS 




ERHAPS the greatest charm of Ath- 
ens and of the islands and moun- 
tains round about it Hes in their 
power to lure back your belief in 
a great many fine people of whose 
remarkable deeds you had grown sceptical — of 
whose existence even you had begun to doubt. 
It is something very serious when one loses faith 
in so delightful a young man as Theseus, and it is 
worth while sailing under the lee shores of Crete, 
where he killed the Minotaur, if for no other pur- 
pose than to have your admiration for him re- 
stored. If we could only be as sure of restoring 
by travel all of those other people of whom our 
elders ceased telling us when we left the nursery, 
I would head an expedition to the north pole, 
not to discover open seas and altitudes and 
eclipses and such weighty things, but to locate 
that nice and kindly old gentleman, and his toy 
store and his reindeer, who used to come at 
Christmas -time, and who has stopped coming 
since I left school. It is certainly worth while 



MODERN ATHENS 



179 



going all the way to 
Greece to see the 
Hill of the Nymphs, 
and the very cave 
where Pan used to 
sleep in the hot mid- 
day, and to thrill 
over the four cross- 
roads and the high, 
gloomy pass where 
the Sphinx lay in 
wait for QEdipus 
with her cruel claws 
and inscrutable 
smile. 

The story that 
must always strike 
every child as most 
sad and unsatisfac- 
tory is the one which 
tells us how the fa- 
ther of Theseus killed himself when his son came 
sailing back triumphant, and so gallantly engaged 
in entertaining the beautiful Athenian maidens 
whose lives he had saved that he forgot to hoist 
the white sails, and caused his father to throw 
himself off the high rocks in despair. 

This used to appeal to me as one of the most 
pathetic incidents in history ; but as time wore 
on my sympathy for the father and indignation 
against Theseus passed away, and I forgot about 
them both. But when they point out where the 




GREEK SOLDIER IN THE NATIONAL 
(ALBANIAN) UNIFORM 



iSo THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

black sails were first seen entering the bay, and 
you stand on the rock from which the people 
watched for Theseus, and from which his father 
threw himself down, you feel just as sorry, and 
you rebel just as strongly against that morbid 
anticlimax, as you did when you first read the 
story in knickerbockers. It seems almost too sad 
to be true. 

They had such a delightful way of mixing up 
the histories of gods and mortals in those days 
that the imaginative person who visits Athens 
will find himself gazing as gratefully and as open- 
eyed at the rocks in which the Centaur hid as 
at those from which Demosthenes delivered his 
philippics, just as in London the room at the 
Charter House where Colonel Newcome said 
"Adsum " for the last time is much more real 
than that room in Edinburgh in which Rizzio was 
killed, or as the rock from which Monte Cristo 
sprang, at the base of the Chateau d'lf, is so 
much more actual than the entire field of Water- 
loo. It is hard to know just which was real and 
which a delightful myth ; and yet there has been 
so little change in Greece since then that you are 
brought nearer to Alcibiades and to Pericles than 
you can ever come, in this world at least, to Dr. 
Johnson and Dean Swift. You cannot recreate 
Grub Street and the debtors' prison, but Euboea 
still " looks on Marathon, and Marathon on the 
sea," and, if you are presumptuous, you can 
strut up and down the rocky plateau from which 
Demosthenes spoke, or take your seat in one of 



MODERN ATHENS l8l 

the marble chairs of the Theatre of Dionysus, 
and pretend you are a worthy citizen of Athens 
Hstening to a satire of Sophocles, j 

The quiet and fresh cleanliness of modern 
Athens comes to you after the roar and dirt of 




GREEK PEASANT GIRL 



Cairo's narrow lanes and dusty avenues like the 
touch of damask table linen and silver after the 
greasy oil -cloth of a Mediterranean coasting 
steamer. It is quiet, sunny, and well-bred. You 
do not fight your way through legions of donkey- 



l82 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

boys and dragomans, nor are your footsteps 
echoed by swarms of guides and beggars. It is a 
pretty city, with the look of a water-color. The 
houses are a light yellow, and the shutters a 
watery green, and the tile roofs a delicate red, and 
the sky above a blue seldom shown to ordinary 
mortals, but reserved for the eyes of painters and 
poets, who have a sort of second sight, and so are 
always seeing it and using it for a background. 
Athens is a very new city, wath new streets and 
new public buildings, and a new King and Royal 
Palace. It is like a little miniature. There is a 
little army, chiefly composed of officers, and a 
miniature cabinet, and a beautiful miniature uni- 
versity, and everybody knows everybody else ; and 
when the King or Queen drives forth, the guard 
turns out and blows a bugle, and so all Athens, 
which is always sitting at the cafes around the 
square of the palace, nods its head and says, 
*' The Queen is going for a drive," or, *' Her 
Majesty has returned early to-day," and then 
continues to clank its sword and to twirl its mus- 
tache and to sip its coffee. Modern Athens 
tends towards the Frank in dress and habit of 
thought. The men have adopted his costume, 
and the women wear little flat curls like the 
French ladies in Le Figaro, and peaked bonnets 
and high heels. 

The national costume of the Greeks is taken 
from the Albanians, but it is much more honored 
in the breach than in the observance. Like all 
national costumes, it is only worn, except for 



MODERN ATHENS 185 

political effect and before a camera, by the lower 
classes, and also by three regiments of the army. 
You see it in the streets, but it is not so univer- 
sally popular as one would suppose from the pict- 
ures of Athens in the illustrated papers and by 
the photographs in the shop-windows. It is a 
most remarkable costume, and as widely different 
from the flowing robe and short skirt of the early 
Greeks as men in accordion petticoats and heavy 
white tights and a Zouave jacket must evidently 
be. In the country it still obtains, and it is the 
farmers and peasants and their wives and the sol- 
diers who supply the picturesque element of dress 
to the streets of the city. 

It is an inscrutable problem why, with all 
the national costumes in the world to choose 
and pick from, the world should have decided 
upon the dress of the Frank, that is, of the for- 
eigner — ourselves. In Spain the peasants have 
discarded their knickerbockers and short jackets, 
even in the country, for the long trousers and 
ill-fitting ready-made clothing of a French ''sweat- 
er," and the Moors cover their robes with over- 
coats from Manchester, and the Arabs and Chinese 
and Swiss and Turks are giving up the pictu- 
resque garments that are comfortable and becom- 
ing to them, and look exceedingly ugly and un- 
comfortable in our own modern garb, which is 
the ugliest and most uncomfortable of national 
costumes yet devised by men or tailors. If you 
judge by the uniforms of the army of officers and 
by the dress of the women of Athens, you would 



i86 



THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 



think you were in a French city and among 
French people. It seems a pity that this should 
be so ; that Athens, of all cities, should be built of 

Italian villas, inhabited by 
people who ape the French, 
and governed by a King 
from Denmark ; still, they 
did not make a success of 
it when they tried, fifty years 
ago, to govern 
themselves. It is 
perhaps hardly 
fair to expect the 
Greeks, or even 
the Athenians, 
to live up to the 
great rock and 
the monuments 
that crown it, 
and the people 
of Greece are no 
doubt as fine as 
those of other little kingdoms or principalities 
scattered about Europe ; but then the other king- 
doms and principalities have not the history of 
early Greece to call their own nor the Acropolis 
to look up to. 

The rock of the Acropolis is hardly more a 
part of modern Greece than the Rock of Gibraltar 
is a part of Spain. Geographically it is, but it 
belongs as much to the visitor as to the native, so 
little inspiration has he apparently drawn from 




ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN 



MODERN ATHENS 



187 



it, and so little has it served to bring out in him 
to-day those qualities that made demigods of his 
ancestors. I think I represent the average intelli- 
gence, and yet at this moment I cannot think of 
any Greek within the last hundred years who has 
gained world-wide renown, either as a sculptor, an 
artist, a soldier, a writer of comedies and satires, 
a statesman, nor even as an archaeologist ; the 
very historians of Greece and the exponents of 
its secrets and the most distinguished of its ex- 
cavators are of other countries. 
They have many heroes of their 
own ; you see their portraits or 
their photographs in every shop- 
window ; but they are not as 
miliar to you as the faces 
histories of those 
other Greeks who 
sighed because 
there were no / 

more worlds, and 
whose fame has 
lasted long after 
the other worlds 
were discovered. 
One would think 
that some young 
Greek, on arising 
in the morning 

and seeing the Acropolis against the sky, would 
say to himself, "To-day I shall do something 
worthy of that." And were he to say that often 




ALBANIAN PEASANT WOMAN 



i88 



THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 



enough, and try to live up to the fortress and the 
temple above him, he might help to make Greece 
in this known world what she was in the smaller 
world of her day of glory. It is not because the 

world has grown and giv- 
en her more with which to 
compete that she has fall- 
en into lesser and lesser 
significance ; for though 
the world has increased 
in latitude and longitude, 
it has not yet carved an- 
other Hermes like that 
of Praxiteles; and though 
it has added three conti- 
nents since his day, it has 
never equalled in marbles 
the fluttering draperies 
of the Flying Victory, 
nor the carvings over the 
doorway of the Erech- 
theum. 

But, as far as in him 
lies, the Greek has en- 
deavored to copy the tra- 
ditions of his ancestors. 
He holds Olympic games in the ancient arena 
which King George has had excavated, and if 
victorious receives a wreath of wild olives from 
the hands of the King ; and he builds the new 
market where the old market stood, and the new 
military hospital as near as is possible to the 




GREEK PEASANT 



MODERN ATHENS 



189 



hospital of yEsculapius. But he cannot restore 
to the market-place that very human citizen who 
cast in his shell against Aristides because he 
was aweary of hearing him called the Just ; nor 
can either his games or his hospital bring back 
the perfect figure and health of the' men whose 
figures and profiles liave set the model for all 




ALBANIAN PEASANT IN THE STREETS OF ATHENS 



time. He has, however, retained the Greek lan- 
guage, which is very creditable to him, as it is a 
language one learns only after much difficulty, 



and then forgets at once. 



He even goes so far 



IQO THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 



as to put up the names of the streets in Greek, 
which strikes the bewildered tourist trying to find 
his way back to his hotel as a trifle pedantic, and 
he prints his daily newspaper in this same tongue. 
This is, perhaps, going a little too far, as it leaves 
you in some doubt as to whether you have been 
reading of the Panama scandal or a reprint on the 
battle of Marathon. 

Baron Sina, a Greek banker, has shown the most 
public-spirited and patriotic generosity, and taste 
as well, in erecting the buildings of the university 
at his own expense and giving them to the city. 
They are reproductions in many ways of different 
parts of the temples of the Acropolis in minia- 
ture. The Polytechnic is almost an exact copy 
of the front of the Parthenon. There is a picture 
of it from a photograph given in this article, but 
it can supply no idea of the beauty of the modern 
reproduction of this temple. The lines and meas- 
urements are the same in degree ; and the Poly- 
technic, besides, is colored and gilded as was the 
original Parthenon, and for the first time makes 
you understand how brilliant reds and beautiful 
blues and gold and black on marble can be com- 
bined with the marble's purity and help rather 
than cheapen it. It is a lesson in loveliness, and 
is as wonderful and brilliantly beautiful a building 
as the marble and gold monument to the Prince 
Consort in Hyde Park is vulgar and atrocious. 
If this copy in miniature, this working model of 
the Parthenon, moves one as it does, it can be 
understood how great must be the strength and 



1 



MODERN ATHENS 



193 



purity of the Parthenon, even in ruins, with its 
gilt washed to a dull brown and its colors and 
bass-reliefs stripped from its pediment. I shall 
certainly not attempt to describe it. 

There are very few tourists who visit Athens in 
proportion to those who visit far less momentous 
ruins ; thousands go to Rome and see the Colos- 
seum, to Egypt and view the storied walls of the 
great rude temples along the Nile, and as many 
more make the tour of the English cathedral 
towns ; but in Athens it is almost difficult to find 
a guide. There are not more than a half-dozen, 
I am sure, in the whole city, and the Acropolis is 
yours if you wish, and you are often as much 
alone as though you had been the first to climb 
its sides. I do not mean by this that it is neg- 
lected, or that relic -hunters may chip at it or 
carry away pieces of its handiwork, or broken bits 
of the Turkish shells that have shattered it, but 
the guards are unobtrusive, and you are free to 
wander in and out in this forest of marble and 
fallen trunks of columns as though you were the 
ghost of some Athenian citizen revisiting the 
scenes of his former life. 

There is no question that half of the pleasure 
you receive in wandering over the top of this 
great wind-blown rock, with the surrounding 
snow -touched mountains on a level with your 
eye, and the great temples rearing above you or 
lying broken at your feet, magnificent even there, 
is due to your seeing them alone, to the fact that 
no guide's parrot-like volubility harasses you, no 
13 



194 



THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 



guard's scornful gloom chills your enthusiasm. 
The great bay of turquoise-blue and the green 
fields and the bunches of cactus and groves of 

dark olive-trees below are un- 
spoiled by modern innova- 
tions, and the hills are still 
dotted with sheep and shep- 
herds, as they were in the 
days of Sappho. 

Overhead is the blue sky, 
with the ivory columns be- 
tween , far below you is the 
steep naked rock, or, on the 
other hand, the two semicir- 
cles of marble seats cushioned 
with velvet moss and carpeted 
with daisies and violets, and 
beyond the limits of the yel- 
low town and its red roofs and 
dark green gardens stretches 
the green plain until it touch- 
es the sea, or is blocked by 
AN OLD ATHENIAN OF" Mount Hymcttus or Mount 
THE PRESENT DAY PentcHcus, bcyond which lat- 
ter lies the field of Marathon. 
Sitting on the edge of the rock, you can imagine 
the actors strutting out into the theatre below, 
and the acquiescent chorus chanting its surprise 
or horror, and almost see the bent shoulders and 
heads of the people filling the half -circle and 
leaning forward to catch each word of the play 
as it comes to them through the actors' masks. 




MODERN ATHENS 



195 



Sounds, no matter how far afield, drift to you 
drowsily, like the voice of one reading aloud on 
a summer's day — the bleating of the sheep in the 
valley where Plato argued, and the jangling of a 
goat's bell, or the laughter of children flying kites 
on the Pnyx, a quarter of a mile away. And be- 
yond the reach of sound is the ^gean Sea wel- 
tering in the sun, with little 
three-cornered sails, like tops, 
or a great vessel drawing a 
chalk-line after it through the 
still surface of the water. All 
things are possible at such 
a time in this place. You 
can almost hear the bees on 
Mount Hymettus, and you 
would receive the advance of 
a Centaur as calmly as Alice 
noted the approach of the 
White Rabbit. You believe 
in nymphs and satyrs. They 
have their homes there in 
those caves, and in the thick 
green, almost black, woods at 
the base of the Parnes range, 
and you love the bravery of 
St. Paul, who dared to doubt 
such things when he stood on 
the rock at your feet and told 
the men of Athens that they were in many things 
too superstitious. It is something to have seen 
the ribs cut in the rock on the top of the Acropolis 




A GREEK SHEPHERD 



196 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

which kept the wheels of the chariots from slipping 
when the Panathenaic procession moved along the 
Via Sacra to the Eleusinian mysteries, to have 
looked upon the caryatides of the Erechtheum, 
and to have wanted back as a lost part of your own 
self, for the time being, the Elgin marbles. When 
Napoleon stole the Venus of Milo he placed her in 
the Louvre, where every one will see her sooner or 
later ; for if he is good he goes to Paris when he 
dies, and if he is bad he is sure to go there in his 
lifetime. But who has ever been to the British 
Museum ? One would as soon think of visiting 
Pentonville prison. And how do the marbles 
look under the soot-stained windows or the gray 
of London fog? Like the few Lord Elgin did 
not want, and that stand out like ivory in their 
proper height against the soft sky that knows 
and loves them? When the people of Great 
Britain have returned the Elgin marbles to 
Greece, and the Rock of Gibraltar to Spain, and 
the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, and Egypt to 
the Egyptians, they will be a proud and haughty 
people, and will be able to hold their heads as 
high as any one. 

One cannot help feeling that the King of 
Greece has a much greater responsibility than he 
knows. Other monarchs must look after their 
boundaries ; he must not only look after his 
boundaries, but his sky-line. Another such af- 
front to good taste as the observatory on the 
Hill of the Nymphs, and the sky-line of Athens 
will be unrecognizable. And the tall chimneys 



MODERN ATHENS I97 

at the Piraeus are not half as attractive to the 
view as the spars of the ships. It is much better 
not to have manufactories that must have chim- 
neys than to spoil a view which no other kingdom 
can equal. Any king can put up a chimney ; 
very few are given the care of an Acropolis ; and 
if the King and Queen of Greece wish to be re- 
membered as kindly by the rest of the world as 
they are loved dearly by their adopted people, 
they will guard the treasure put in their keeping, 
and sweep observatories from sacred hills, and 
continue to limit the guides on the Acropolis, 
and so win the gratitude of a civilized world. 




VII 

CONSTANTINOPLE 

LITTLE Italian steamer drew cau- 
tiously away from the Piraeus when 
the waters of the bay were quite 
black and the quays looked like a 
row of foot -lights in front of the 
dark curtain of the night. She grazed the anchor 
chains of H. M. S. the Colossus^ where that ship of 
war's broad white deck lay level with the water, 
as heavy and solid as a stone pier. She seemed 
to rise like an island of iron from the very bottom 
of the bay. Her sailors, as broad and heavy and 
clean as the decks, raised their heads from their 
pipes as we passed under the glare of the man-of- 
war's electric lights, and a bugle call came faintly 
from somewhere up in the bow. It sounded as 
though it were a quarter of a mile away. Our 
lower deck was packed with Greeks and Albanians 
and Turks, lying as closely together on the hard 
planks as cartridges in the front of a Circassian's 
overcoat. They were very dirty and very hand- 
some, in rakish little black silk pill-box caps, with 
red and gold tops, and the initials '' H. I." worked 



CONSTANTINOPLE I99 

in the embroidery ; their canvas breeches were as 
baggy and patched and muddy as those of a foot- 
ball-player, and their sleeveless jackets and double 
waistcoats of red and gold made them look like a 
uniformed soldiery that had seen very hard ser- 
vice. Priests of the Greek Church, with long hair 
and black formless robes, and hats like stove- 
pipes with the brim around the upper end, pa- 
raded the narrow confines of the second cabin, 
and German tourists with red guide-books, and 
the Italian ship's officers with a great many med- 
als and very bad manners, stamped up and down 
the main-deck and named the shadowy islands 
that rose from the sea and dropped out of sight 
again as we steamed past them. 

In the morning the islands had disappeared al- 
together, and we were between high banks — high- 
er than, but not so steep as the Palisades ; rows of 
little scrubby trees ran along their fronts in lateral 
lines, and at their base mud forts with mud bar- 
racks and thatched roofs pointed little cannon at 
us from every jutting rock. We were so near that 
one could have hit the face of the high hills with 
a stone. These were the Dardanelles, the banks 
that nature has set between the Sea of Marmora 
and the Mediterranean to protect Constantinople 
from Mediterranean squadrons. We pass between 
these banks for hours, or between the high bank 
of Roumelia on one side and the low hilly coun- 
try of Asia where Troy once stood on the other, 
until, at sunset, we are halted in the narrowest 
strait of the Dardanelles, between the Castle of 



200 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

Asia and the Castle of Europe, "the Lock of the 
Sea" — that sea of which Gibraltar is the key. 
That night we cross through the vSea of Marmora, 
and by sunrise are at Constantinople. 

Constantinople is such a long word, and so few 
of the people you know have visited it in com- 
parison with those who have wintered at Cairo or 
at Rome, or who have spent a season at Vienna, 
or taken music -lessons in Berlin, that you ap- 
proach it with a mind prepared for surprises and 
with the hope of the unexpected. I had expect- 
ed that the heart of the Ottoman Empire would 
be outwardly a brilliant and flashing city of gild- 
ed domes and minarets, a cluster of colored house 
fronts rising from the dancing waters of the Bos- 
porus, and with the banks lined with great white 
palaces among gardens of green trees. There p.re 
more gilded domes in New York city and in Bos- 
ton than in Constantinople. In New York there 
are three, and in Boston there is the State House, 
which looks very fine indeed from the new bridge 
across the Charles when the river is blocked with 
gray ice, and a setting sun is throwing a light on 
the big yellow globe. But Constantinople is all 
white and gray; the palaces that line the Bos- 
porus are of a brilliant white stucco, and the 
mosques like monster turtles, which give the city 
its chief distinction, are a dull white. In the 
Turkish quarter the houses are more sombre still, 
of a peculiar black wood, and built like the old 
log forts in which our great-great-grandfathers 
took refuge from the Indians — square buildings 



o 

"1 

o 
o 
z 

Ui 

H 
S> 

z 

H 

z 

o 

f 




CONSTANTINOPLE 203 

with an overhanging story from which those in- 
side could fire down upon the enemy below. The 
jutting balcony on the Turkish houses is for the 
less serious purpose of allowing the harem to 
look down upon the passers-by. 

Constantinople is a fair-weather city, and needs 
the sun and the blue sky and the life of the waters 
about it, which give to the city its real individu- 
ality. It misses in winter the pleasure-yachts of 
the summer months, the white uniforms of the 
thousands of boatmen, and the brighter dressing 
of the awnings and flags of the ships and steam- 
ers. But the waters about Constantinople are its 
best part, and are fuller and busier and brighter 
than either those around the Battery or those be- 
low the Thames Embankment, and by standing 
on its wide wooden bridge, over which more 
people pass in a day than over any other (save 
London Bridge) in the world, one can see a pro- 
cession of all the nations of the East. 

Constantinople is a much more primitive city 
than one would expect the largest of all Eastern 
cities to be. It impresses you as a city without 
any municipal control whatsoever, and you come 
upon a building with the stamp of the municipal 
palace upon it with as much surprise as you would 
feel in finding an underwriter's office at the north 
pole. In many ways it is the most primitive city 
that I have ever been in. It all that pertains to 
the Sultan, to the religion of the people, of which 
he is the head, and to the army, the recognition 
due them is rigidly and impressively observed. 



204 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

But in what regards the local life of the people 
there seems to be absolutely no interest and no 
responsibility. There is no such absolute power 
in Europe, not excepting that of the Czar or of the 
young Emperor, as is that exercised by the Sul- 
tan ; and the mosques of the faithful are guarded 
and decorated and held more highly in reverence 
than are many churches of a more civilized peo- 
ple ; and the army impresses you as one you 
would much prefer to lead than one from which 
you would elect to run away. But the comfort 
of the inhabitants of Constantinople is little 
considered. There is nothing that one can see 
of what we call public spirit, unless building a 
mosque and calling it after yourself, in a city al- 
ready supplied with the most magnificent of such 
temples, can be called public-spirited. Of course 
one does not go to Constantinople to see electric 
lights and asphalt pavements, nor to gather statis- 
tics on the poor-rate, but it is interesting to find 
people so nearly in touch with the world in many 
things, and so far away from it in others. As long 
as I do not have to live in Constantinople, I find 
its lack of municipal spirit quite as interesting a 
feature of the city as its mosques. 

Constantinople, for example, is a city with as 
large a population as has Berlin or Vienna, and its 
fire department is what you see in the illustration 
accompanying this chapter. They are very hand- 
some men, as you can note for yourself, and very 
smart-looking ; but when they go to a fire they 
make a bargain with the owner of the building 



CONSTANTINOPLE 207 

before they attempt to save his property. The 
great fire-tower in this capital of the Ottoman 
Empire is in Galata, and from it watchmen sur- 
vey the city with glasses, and at the first sight of 
a blazing roof one of them runs down the tower 
and races through the uneven streets, calling out 
the fact that a house is burning, and where that 
house may be. Each watchman he meets takes 
up the cry, and continues calling out that the 
house is burning, even though the house is three 
miles away, until it burns down or is built up 
again, or the watchman is retired for long service 
and pensioned. Besides these amateur firemen 
there are two real fire companies, but they can 
do little in a city of 880,000 people. 

The police who guard Constantinople at night 
are an equally primitive body of men. They 
carry a heavy club, about five feet long and as 
thick as a man's wrist, and with this they beat 
the stones in the streets to assure people that 
they are attending strictly to their work, and are 
not sleeping in doorways. The result of this is 
that no one can get to sleep, and all evil-minded 
persons can tell exactly where the night-watch- 
man is, and so keep out of his way. The watch- 
man under my window seemed to act on the idea 
of the gentleman who, on taking his first trip on 
a sleeping-car, declared that if he couldn't sleep 
no one else should, and acted accordingly. 

There is nothing, so far as I can see, in which 
the Oriental delights as much as he does in making 
a noise. It is most curious to find a whole people 



208 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

without nerves, who cannot talk without shout- 
ing, and who cannot shout without giving you the 
idea that they are in great pain, and that unless 
relief comes promptly they will die, and that it will 
be your fault. Those of them who sell bread or 
fruits or fish or beads, or whatever it may be, in 
the streets, bellow rather than shout, or cry in 
sharp, agonizing shrieks, high and nasal and fierce. 
They apparently never " move on." They always 
meet under your window or at the corners of a 
street, and there all shout at once, and no one 
pays the least attention to them. They might 
be lamp-posts or minarets, for all the notice they 
receive. I can imagine no fate or torture so 
awful as to be ill in Constantinople and to have 
to lie helpless and listen to the street cries, to the 
tin horns of the men who run ahead of the street- 
cars — which incidentally gives you an idea of the 
speed of these cars — and to the snarling and 
barking of the thousands of street dogs. 

There are three or four intensely interesting 
ceremonies and many show-places in Constanti- 
nople which are unlike anything of the same sort 
in any other city. Apart from these and the 
bazars, which are very wonderful, there is nothing 
in the city itself which makes even the Oriental 
seek it in preference to his own mountains or 
plains or native village. Constantinople, so far 
as its population is to be considered, is standing 
still. It impresses you as stagnant before your 
statistical friend or the oldest member of the 
diplomatic corps or the oldest inhabitant tells 



o 
o 

> 
z 

»<! 

O 

•3d 

n 

c 

(n 

> 

Z 

H 
»— I 

Z 

o 

f 

M 




CONSTANTINOPLE 211 

you that it is so. You can very well imagine 
the Frank's finding a long residence in Cairo pos- 
sible, or in pretty little Athens, where the boule- 
vards and the classics are so strangely jumbled, 
but one cannot understand a man's settling down 
in Constantinople. Where there are no women 
there can be no court, and the few rich Greek 
residents and still fewer of the pashas and the 
diplomats make the society of the city. Even 
these last find it far from gay, for it so happens 
that the ambassadors are all either bachelors, 
widowers, or the husbands of invalid wives, and 
the result is a society which depends largely on a 
very smart club for its amusement. In the win- 
ter-time, when the snow and rain sweep over the 
three hills, and the solitary street of Galata is a 
foot deep in slush and mud, and the china stoves 
radiate a candle-like heat in a room built to let in 
all the air possible, I can imagine few less desira- 
ble places than the capital of the Ottoman Em- 
pire. This is in the winter only ; as I have said, 
it is a fair-weather city, and I did not see it at 
its best. 

There are three things to which one is taken 
in Constantinople — the mosque of St. Sophia, 
the treasures of the Sultan, and the Sultan going 
to pray in his own private mosque. The Sultan's 
own mosque is situated conveniently near his 
palace, not more than a few hundred feet distant. 
Once every Friday he rides this distance, and 
once a year journeys as far as the mosque of St. 
Sophia. With these outings he is content, and 



212 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

on no other occasions does he show himself to 
his people or leave his palace. This is what it is 
to be a sovereign of many countries in Europe, 
Asia, and Africa, the head of the Mussulman re- 
ligion ; and the ruler of nations and lands con- 
quered by your ancestors, of which you see less 
than a donkey- boy in Cairo or the owner of a 
caique on the Bosporus. We used to sing in 
college, 

" The Sultan better pleases me ; 
His life is full of jollity." 

The jollity of a life which the possessor believes 
to be threatened by assassination in every form 
and at any moment is of a somewhat ghastly 
nature. 

You obtain tickets for the Selamlik, as the cere- 
mony of the Sultan's visit to his mosque is called, 
and you are requested, as you are supposed to be 
the guest of the Sultan on these occasions, not 
to bring opera -glasses. But it is nevertheless 
strongly suggestive of a theatrical performance. 
The mosque is on one side of a wide street ; the 
houses in which the spectators sit, like the audi- 
ence in a grand-stand, are on the other. One 
end of the street is blocked by a great square, 
and the other by the gateway of the palace from 
which the Sultan comes. The street is not more 
than a hundred yards in length. A band of music 
enters this square first and plays the overture to 
the ceremony. The musicians are mounted on 
horseback and followed by a double line of caval- 



CONSTANTINOPLE 2l^ 

rymen on white horses, and each carrying a lance 
at rest with a red pennant. There are thousands 
of these ; they stretch out hke telegraph poles on 
the prairie to an interminable length, their scarlet 
pennants flapping and rustling in the sharp east 
wind like a forest of autumn leaves. You begin 
to suspect that they are going around the square 
and returning again many times, as the supers do 
in " Ours." Then the horses turn black and the 
overcoats of the men change from gray to blue, 
and more scarlet pennants stretch like an arch of 
bunting along the street leading to the palace, 
until they have all filed into the open square and 
halt there stirrup to stirrup, a moving mass of 
four thousand restless horses and four thousand 
scarlet flags. And then more bands and drums 
and bugle- calls come from every point of the 
city, and regiment after regiment swarms up the 
hill on which the palace rests, the tune of one 
band of music breaking in on the tune of the 
next, as do those of the political processions at 
home, until every approach to the gate of the 
palace is blocked from curb to curb with armed 
men, and you look out and down upon the points 
of five thousand bayonets crushed into a space 
not one-fifth as large as Madison Square. There 
is no populace to see this spectacle, only those of 
the faithful who stop on their way to Mecca to 
catch this glimpse of the head of their religion, 
and a few women who have brought petitions to 
present to him and who are allowed within the 
lines of soldiers. 



214 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

But pashas and beys and other high dignitaries 
are arriving every moment in full regalia, for this 
is like a drawing-room at Buckingham Palace, or 
a levee at St. James's, and every one must leave 
all other matters to attend it. Twenty men with 
twenty carts rush out suddenly from the curtain 
of Zouaves and sailors, and scatter soft gravel on 
the fifty yards of roadway over which the Sultan 
intends to drive. They remind you of the men 
in the circus who spread sawdust over the ring 
after the horses' hoofs have torn it. And then, 
high above the heads of the nine thousand sol- 
diers and the few thousand more dignitaries, dip- 
lomats, and spectators, a priest in a green turban 
calls aloud from the top of the minaret. It is 
a very beautiful cry or call, in a strong, sweet tenor 
voice, inexpressibly weird and sad and impressive. 
It is answered by a bugle call given slowly and 
clearly like a man speaking, and at a certain note 
the entire nine thousand soldiers salute. It is 
done with a precision and shock so admirable that 
you would think, except for the volume of the 
noise, that but one man had moved his piece. 
The voice of the priest rises again, and is answered 
by triumphant strains of brass, and the gates of 
the palace open, and a glittering procession of 
officers and princes and pashas moves down the 
broad street, encircling a carriage drawn by two 
horses and driven by servants in gold. At the 
sight of this the soldiers cry " Long live the Sul- 
tan "three times. It is like the roar of a salute 
of cannon, and has all the feeling of a cheer. The 




STREET DOGS OF CONSTANTINOPLE 



CONSTANTINOPLE 217 

Sultan sits in the back of the open carriage, a 
sHght, tired -looking man, with a pale face and 
black beard. He is dressed in a fur overcoat 
and fez. As he passes, the men of his army — 
and they are men — salute him, and the veiled 
women stand on tiptoe behind them and stretch 
out their petitions, and the pashas and chamber- 
lains and cabinet ofificers bend their bodies and 
touch the hand to the heart, lip, and forehead, 
and drop it again to the knee. The pilgrims to 
Mecca fall prostrate on their faces, and the Sul- 
tan bows his head and touches his hand to his 
fez. Opposite him sits Osman Pasha, the hero 
of the last war, and one of the greatest gen- 
erals of the world, his shoulders squared, his 
heart covered with stars, and his keen, observant 
eyes wandering from the pale face of his sovereign 
to the browned, hardy-looking countenances of 
his men. 

The Sultan remains a half-hour in the mosque, 
and on his return drives himself back to the pal- 
ace in an open landau. This was the first time 
I had seen the Turkish soldier in bulk, and he 
impressed me more than did any other soldier I 
had seen along the shores of the Mediterranean. 
I had seen the British troops repulse an imaginary 
attack upon the rock of Gibraltar, and half of the 
Army of Occupation in Egypt dislodge an imag- 
inary enemy from the sand hills around Cairo, 
and I had seen French and Italian and Greek sol- 
diers in lesser proportion and in lesser activity. 
But to me none of these had the build or the 



2l8 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

bearing or the ready if rough look of these Turks. 
The French Zouaves of Algiers came next to 
them to my mind, and it may be that the similar- 
ity of the uniform would explain that ; but as I 
heard the Sultan's troops that morning marching 
up the hills to their outlandish music, and looked 
into eyes that had never been shaded from the 
sun, and at the spring and swing of legs that had 
never worn civilized trousers, I recalled several 
notable battles of past history, and the more re- 
cent lines of Mr. Rudyard Kipling where he pays 
his compliments to the Russian on the frontier : 

" I'm sorry for Mr. Bluebeard, 
I'd be sorry to cause him pain ; 
But a hell of a spree 
There is sure to be 
When he comes back again." 

The Oriental is one of those people who do 
things by halves. He has a fine army, but the 
bulk of his navy has not left the Golden Horn 
for many years, and it is doubtful if it could leave 
it ; his palace walls are of mosaic and wonderfully 
painted tiles, and the roofs of rusty tin ; his sons 
are given the questionable but expensive educa- 
tion of Paris, and his daughters are not allowed 
to walk abroad unless guarded by servants, and 
with the knowledge that every policeman spies 
upon them, knowing that, could he detect them 
in an indiscretion, he would be rewarded and gain 
promotion. Consequently it does not surprise 



H 
X 
W 

O 
w 




CONSTANTINOPLE 221 

you when you find the Sultan's treasures heaped 
together under dirty glass cases, and treated with 
the indifference a child pays to its last year's toys. 
The crown-jewels and regalia kept at the Tow- 
er, itself under iron bars and guarded by Beef- 
eaters, are not half as impressive as are the jewels 
of the Sultan, which lie covered with dust under 
a glass show-case, and guarded by a few gloomy- 
looking effendis in frock-coats. All the presents 
from other monarchs and all the gifts of lesser 
notables who have sought some Sultan's favor, 
all the arms and trophies of generations of wars, 
are piled together in this treasury with less care 
than one would give to a rack of pipes. It is a 
very remarkable exhibition, and it is magnificent 
in its Oriental disregard for wealth through long 
association with it. Bronze busts of emperors, 
jewelled swords, imperial orders, music -boxes, 
gun-cases, weapons of gold instead of steel, pre- 
cious stones, and silver dressing-cases are all 
heaped together on dusty shelves, without order 
and classification and without care. You can see 
here handfuls of uncut precious stones on china 
plates, or dozens of gold and silver pistols thrown 
in a corner like kindling-wood. And the most 
remarkable exhibition of all is the magnificent 
robes of those Sultans who are dead, with the 
jewels and jewelled swords and belts and insignia 
worn by them, placed on dummies in a glass case, 
as though they were a row of stuffed birds or 
specimens of rock. In the turbans of one of 
these figures there are pearls as large as a wom- 



222 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

an's thumb, and emeralds and rubies as large as 
eggs, and ropes of diamonds. This sounds like a 
story from the Arabian Nights ; but then these 
are the heroes of the Arabian Nights — the Sul- 
tans who owned the whole northern coast of 
Africa and Asia, and who spent on display and 
ornament what we put into education and rail- 
roads. 

The present Sultan, Abd-ul-Hammed 11. , so 
far differs from those who have preceded him 
that he as well as ourselves spends money on ed- 
ucation and railroads and all that they imply. 
As the head of a religion and of an empire he 
may not cheapen himself by being seen too often 
by his people, but his interests spread beyond 
even the great extent of his own boundaries, and 
his money is given to sufferers as far apart in all 
but misfortune as the Johnstown refugees and 
the victims of the earthquakes of Zante and 
Corfu. And his protection is extended to the 
American missionaries who enter his country to 
preach a religion to which he is opposed. While 
I was in Constantinople he showed the variety 
of his interests in the outside world by making 
two presents. To the Czar of Russia he gave a 
book of photographs of the vessels in his navy, 
and in contrast to this grimly humorous recogni- 
tion of Russia's ambitions he presented to our 
government an emblem in gold and diamonds, 
commemorating in its design and inscription the 
discovering of this country, worth, intrinsically, 
many thousands of dollars. He was, I beHeve, 



CONSTANTINOPLE 223 

the only sovereign who showed a personal inter- 
est in our national celebration, and his gift was 
properly one of the government's most conspic- 
uous exhibits at tlie Columbian Fair. 

The Mosque of St. Sophia is one of the first 
things you are taken to see in Constantinople. 
It is to the Mussulman what St. Peter's is to the 
good Catholic, although Justinian built it, and 
the cross still shows in many parts of the great 
building. Three times during the year this 
mosque is illuminated within and without, and 
every good Mussulman attends there to worship. 

There is something very fine about the religion 
of Mohammed — you do not have to know much 
about it to appreciate the faith of its followers, 
whether you know what it is they believe or not. 
In their outward observance, at least, of the rules 
laid down for them in the Koran, they show a sin- 
cerity which teaches a great lesson. You can see 
them at any hour of the day or in any place go- 
ing through their devotions. A soldier will kneel 
down in a band stand, where a moment before he 
has been playing for the regiment, and say his 
prayers before two thousand spectators*, and I 
have had some difficulty in getting my trunks on 
the Orient Express, because the porters were at 
another end of a crowded, noisy platform bowing 
towards the East. Once a year they fast for a 
month, the season of Ramazan, and as I was in 
Eastern coujntries during that month I know that 
they fast rigidly. Ramazan begins in Egypt 
when the new moon appears in a certain well near 



224 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN 

Cairo. Two men watch this well, and when they 
see the reflection of the new moon on its surface 
they run into Cairo with the news, and Ramazan 
begins. There is nothing which so well illustrates 
the unchangeableness of the East and its customs 
as the sight of these men running through the 
streets of Cairo, with its dog-carts and electric 
lights, its calendars and almanacs, to tell that the 
moon has again reached that point that it had 
reached for many hundreds of years before, when 
all the faithful must fast and pray. 

On one of the last days of Ramazan I went to 
the door of St. Sophia, and was led up a winding 
staircase in one of its minarets — a minaret-tower 
so broad and high that the staircase within it has 
no steps, but is paved smoothly like a street. It 
seemed as though we had been climbing nearly 
ten minutes before we stepped out into a great 
gallery, and looked down upon thousands of tur- 
baned figures bowing and kneeling and rising 
again in long rows like infantry in close order. 
Between these worshippers and ourselves were 
fifty circles of floating tapers swinging from chains, 
and hanging like a smoky curtain of fire between 
us and the figures below. The voice of the priest 
rose in a high, uncanny cry, and the sound of the 
thousands of men falling forward on their faces 
and arms was like the rumble of the waves 
breaking on the shore. Outside, the tops of min- 
arets were circled with lights and lamps strung 
on long ropes, with the ends flying free, and 
swinging to and fro in the night wind like neck- 



w 

X 
H 

O 

!« 

O 

H 

a 
w 

o 

w 

<o 

c: 
w 

c 




CONSTANTINOPLE 227 

laces of stars. This was the most beautiful of all 
the sights of Constantinople ; and as a matter of 
opinion, and not of fact, I think the best part of 
Constantinople is that part of it that is in the air. 



Before ending this last chapter, I should like 
to make two suggestions to the reader who has 
not yet visited the Mediterranean and who thinks 
of doing so. Let him not be deterred, in the first 
place, by any idea of the difficulties of the jour- 
ney, for he can go from Gibraltar along the entire 
northern coast of Africa and into Greece and 
Italy with as little trouble and with as much com- 
fort as it is possible for him to make the journey 
from New York to Chicago. And in the second 
place, should he go in the winter or spring, let 
him not be misled by *' Italian skies," or ''the 
blue Mediterranean," or '' the dancing waters of 
the Bosporus," into imagining that he is going 
to be any warmer on the northern coast of Africa 
than he is in New York. I wore exactly the same 
clothes in Italy that I wore the day I left the 
North River blocked with ice, and I watched a 
snow-storm falling on " the dancing waters of the 
Bosporus. There are some warm days, of course, 
but it is well to follow that good old-fashioned rule 
in any part of the world, that it is cold in winter 
and warm in summer, and people who spend their 
lives in trying to dodge this fact might as well 
try running away from death and the poscal sys- 



228 THE RULERS OF THE MEDITERRANEAN <^ ^^^7"" jfi 

tern. To any one who has but a httle time and 
a Httle money to spend on a hoHday, I would 
suggest going to Gibraltar, and from there to 
Spain and Morocco. This is the only place, per- 
haps, in the world where three so widely different 
people and three such picturesque people as the 
Moor, the British soldier, and the Spaniard can 
be found within two hours of one another. 

Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized 
than any other part of the northern part of Africa; 
and it can be seen, and with it the southern cities 
of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six 
weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dol- 
lars. This was to me the most interesting part 
of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course — for it 
possesses few of the beauties or monuments or 
historical values of the other shores of that sea — 
because it was unknown to tourists and guide- 
books. A visit to the rest of the Mediterranean 
is merely verifying for yourself what you have 
already learned from others. 



THE END 



